It'll be 3 lifetimes before Kensington Strangler gets out

ANTONIO RODRIGUEZ, the man who came to be called the Kensington Strangler, was convicted Thursday of raping and strangling three women, for which he was immediately handed three consecutive life sentences.

"This is just a horrific case. You not only violated these young women while they were living, but you violated them when they were dead," Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Minehart said.

Testimony during the three-day, nonjury trial revealed that Rodriguez, 23, choked the women during sex, continued to have sex with their remains after he'd killed them and posed their bodies on knees with buttocks raised.

Although the defendant did not testify, he gave detailed statements to homicide detectives after being arrested Jan. 17, 2011. He said he met the women - prostitutes - while walking the streets of Kensington and had sex with them in secluded areas where the murders took place.

Rodriguez sat passively in court as the families of his victims spoke of the horror and anguish he unleashed on them following the murders in November and December 2010.

"When these things occur, it just questions humanity. Why do people do these types of things? It's a terrible thing," said Leo Michael Keller, the stepfather of victim Nicole Piacentini, 35, who was a mother of four.

"There are no words," said a sullen Joseph Goldberg, father of victim Elaine Goldberg, 21, a graduate of Little Flower Catholic School who had been a nursing student. "It's just like a huge part of me has died. It's not fun to wake up anymore . . . It's a task to get through the day."

Mary Kanzenberg, the aunt of victim Casey Mahoney, 27, said losing her to such violence was made worse after the city cremated her remains without the family's permission. They still haven't received the ashes, she said.

"It is our hope that the defendant will spend the rest of his life tortured by the isolation he will be in," she said.

Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega said that Rodriguez's actions were the embodiment of evil. Many killers are driven by a motive, he noted, but not Rodriguez.

"He killed these young ladies not out of anger, but because of evilness, wickedness - just to play with them, to pose them . . . With great pleasure, he killed them," said Vega, who tried the case with Assistant District Attorney Bridget Kirn.

Defense attorney William Bowe questioned the reliability of the DNA evidence and a discrepancy over when Rodriguez was taken into custody to ask that he be acquitted of all charges.

The death penalty was not a possibility because Bowe and prosecutors agreed before the trial that Rodriguez could face only life without parole because he waived his right to a jury.