A Putnam County man convicted more than 20 years ago for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl was vindicated Monday when jurors acquitted him during his second trial tied to the grisly case.
Carmel man Andrew Krivak was found not guilty of the awful attack after spending more than two decades behind bars, and more than six years after his co-defendant and friend, Anthony DiPippo, was acquitted of the same crime.
Krivak and DiPippo were accused of raping and killing Carmel teen Josette Wright in the mid-1990s and both were originally found guilty in separate trials in 1997.
The young girl went missing in 1994 and was found dead 13 months later; DiPippo and Krivak were arrested in July 1996 for one of the most shocking crimes ever to take place in Putnam County.
Because jurors found him not guilty of first-degree rape, they were not required to vote on the murder charge, Krivak’s attorney Oscar Michelen told The Post Monday.
“He just started to cry,” Michelen said of his client’s reaction when the verdict was read. “Obviously he thanked us and he couldn’t believe it. I think his words were ‘it’s finally over’ and that’s it, it’s finally over. It’s over for him, it’s over for DiPippo and the community.”
Outside the courtroom Monday, Krivak told reporters, “It’s about time,” according to The Journal News. “There’s a lot I can’t say, I’ll just bite my tongue on most of it and I’ll just say I appreciate the jury seeing the truth and coming back with a not guilty verdict. It’s been far too long, it should’ve ended 2016 when Anthony was exonerated.”
DiPippo had three trials – 1997, 2011 and 2016 – before he was found not guilty at the last one.
Krivak was originally convicted and sentenced to prison after he implicated himself in the crime, but his defense team argued at his retrial that it was coerced and he was bullied by investigators with the Putnam sheriff’s office.
“DNA has proven that people falsely confess,” Michelen said.
Michelen said there were multiple points he and co-counsel Karen Newirth made during the seven-week trial that could lead to reasonable doubt, including that the young girl was seen alive by two people after police said she was already dead. The defense also pointed the finger at Howard Gombert as the possible perp. He is a convicted sex offender who preyed on victims around the same time Wright was killed.
Putnam prosecutors relied on Krivak’s purported confession and a witness who said she saw Krivak and DiPippo rape a tied-up Wright and dump her body in the woods, according to The Journal News. The defense argued the witness, former friend Denise Rose, was fed a story by detectives and lied.
District Attorney Robert Tendy, who helped prosecute the case, reportedly denied investigators coerced Krivak or witnesses in his closing argument and said while Gombert was a “sick, sick human being,” there was no evidence he committed the stomach-turning crime.
“He confessed to it,” Tendy said of Krivak during his closing summation, according to the newspaper. “The confession was not coerced.”
Tendy told The Post following the verdict: “The jurors spoke and we have to respect their verdict.”
DiPippo was in the courtroom when the verdict was announced. Unlike Krivak, he never told investigators he committed the crime.
“I needed to hear this,” DiPippo told The Post of his reaction to Monday’s verdict. “I needed this as much as Andy did. As far as him I couldn’t be happier for him, he deserves it.”
DiPippo clinched a $12 million settlement from Putnam County in 2020.
Krivak was granted a new trial in 2019, but was remanded to county jail before a higher court released him to home detention in October 2020 ahead of his trial.