Kalinowski’s cellmates testify
Robin Kalinowski, the Riverside woman accused of killing her sleeping husband, began looking for a hit man last year to kill a lover who apparently had begun cooperating with authorities, two of her former cellmates testified Wednesday.
The two — an admitted thief now free on bail and a woman imprisoned for a sword assault — said their 42-year-old cell-mate made incriminating admissions after befriending them around Christmas time.
The 45-year-old thief claimed Kalinowski admitted she had intentionally killed her husband three years ago and “needed John [her alleged turncoat lover] dead.”
The 46-year-old woman, serving three years for attacking another woman with a sword, said Kalinowski made similar admissions to her while the three women were in the Erie County Holding Center late last December.
Senior Erie County Judge Michael L. D’Amico is slated to begin jury selection at Kalinowski’s murder trial Sept. 22. He reserved decision Wednesday on defense attorney John K. Jordan’s effort to get the testimony of both women quashed on the grounds that they are “agents of the prosecution.”
After the hearing, Jordan said he is fighting efforts by prosecutors Thomas M. Finnerty and Aaron Glazer to have a joint trial next month for the 2005 murder and Kalinowski’s April indictment for allegedly offering to pay an undercover state trooper to kill her former lover.
The 45-year-old thief testified that she befriended the defendant at the Holding Center after mistakenly assuming Kalinowski, like herself, had been a victim of domestic violence. Now free on reduced bail and awaiting verdicts in two local cases, the woman said she wrote her lawyer about Kalinowski’s alleged admissions in early January and let him submit her letter to prosecutors.
Jordan, the defense attorney, noted the woman had a history of 23 convictions throughout the country.
He also stressed that the other informant, the 46-year-old, did not write to the DA about Kalinowski until April, some five months after she was sentenced for a Buffalo assault and was already an inmate at Albion Correctional Facility.
“I was stressed out. I had my own problems,” the woman said in explaining her delay in contacting authorities about Kalinowski. She said she is seeking either a lesser prison stay or less parole time after her release for helping in the Kalinowski prosecution.
Kalinowski has been jailed since last Nov. 30 on a murder and weapons indictment in the fatal shooting of her businessman husband, Kevin M., 41, as he slept in their Rosedale Street home Nov. 10, 2005. The couple had been married 15 years and had two children.
In April, she was indicted on murder conspiracy charges for allegedly offering to pay an undercover trooper posing as a hit man to kill the man with whom she was having an affair at the time of her husband’s death.
