Paradise Township, PA: Retrial begins for woman convicted of killing husband

Facing a retrial for murdering her husband, Eleanor Nicolosi, 75, strolls into court in Stroudsburg on Thursday afternoon. Escorting her is deputy Andrea Carrasco.
David Kidwell/Pocono Record

By Chad Smith
Pocono Record Writer
December 03, 2010
A court appearance Thursday by a 75-year-old woman charged with murdering her husband had its beginnings with a Sept. 5, 2001, call to police reporting a man missing in Paradise Township.

Eleanor Nicolosi had been convicted on charges she shot her husband, Francis, to death then hid his body. It was a conviction she successfully appealed in 2008 on the grounds that some of the evidence against her in her 2005 trial was improperly admitted.

Thursday marked a new chapter in the saga, as her retrial opened with prosecutors arguing that physical evidence — blood, bullets, carpet fibers — and other testimony will prove she murdered her husband. The defense argued that there are major holes in the prosecution's case.

"Someone committed this crime, but it wasn't Miss Nicolosi," said defense attorney Elliott Goldberg of his client, who arrived in court using a walker.

Prosecutors said she called Pennsylvania State Police in 2001 to report her husband missing.

Nicolosi said her husband had headed out to the forest the day before to collect apples from an orchard the two kept, but he never returned.

When officers arrived at their Williams Road home, she directed them to the area in the forest where her husband was last seen.

Not far away, investigators noticed a pile of blue carpeting. They found his body wrapped in the carpeting. He had been shot five times in the chest and abdomen.

Prosecutors said Nicolosi told several people that her husband had been shot to death before police ever released that information to her.

"How could she have known?" asked First Assistant District Attorney Michael Mancuso. Goldberg said his defense team would prove to the jury that "all was not as it seemed."

The Nicolosis had been married about six years. According to the prosecution, the two often fought and Eleanor Nicolosi often took comprehensive notes describing in detail the nature of the fights.

She even went as far as to secretly tape-record many of them, the prosecution said. But Francis Nicolosi, according to the prosecution, was gregarious and liked to flirt with other women, which may have fueled these fights.