The murder trial begins over the murder of a pre-K teacher found in Carousel Park

A jury in Wilmington began hearing evidence in the 2023 murder of Cynthia Amalfitano, a 63-year-old pre-K teacher whose disappearance captured the nation’s attention before her body was found in the bushes in Carousel Park last September.

Stephen Heck, who was described in court as Amalfitano’s boyfriend, is charged with first-degree murder in her death.

“Bloody, bruised and lifeless,” is how Deputy Attorney General Brianna Mills described Amalfitano’s body in her opening statement to the jury on Monday.

In those opening statements, prosecutors gave a preview of what they expect the evidence to show in the coming week from testimony in Heck’s murder case. They plan to present a combination of video evidence showing Heck and Amalfitano were together before her death and that he subsequently returned to her New Castle County home without her, while bolstering that with cell phone location data.

Mills showed the jury excerpts of surveillance footage documenting the exterior of Amalfitano’s Pike Creek apartment days before her body was discovered.

She told the jury that Amalfitano went with Heck to her Rehoboth residence that weekend for a short overnight trip. Images showed the two leaving. Footage from a neighbor at her Rehoboth home showed the two arriving and then leaving in Heck’s vehicle.

But Mills said Amalfitano “never came back.”

Arrest committed: Tumultuous relationship ends with woman’s murder, body left in Carousel Park: court papers

What the prosecutors plan to argue

She said surveillance footage from the night they believe she was killed shows Heck returning to the apartment alone and staying there overnight before carrying things in and out of the Pike Creek apartment, throwing some items in a dumpster and the next leaves in the morning.

The next morning, a Monday, Amalfitano didn’t show up for work Concord Preschool and Childcare. The witness in the trial testimony Monday was an official at that school who said Amalfitano was never absent from work without warning.

So they first called local hospitals to see if she had been in a car accident. They then called the New Castle County Police Department to conduct a welfare check on her residence. They also mentioned her daughter. Inside the apartment they found her wallet, shoes and phone, as well as her dogs, which she had brought to Rehoboth that weekend.

That morning, her family tried calling Heck nine times but got no answer. New Castle County police questioned him that morning in the parking lot of his apartment. He denied that Amalfitano was his girlfriend and denied any knowledge of her disappearance, Mills told the jury.

‘That’s how she is. She’s disappearing,” Heck told the officer that morning, according to a clip of body camera footage played for the jury Monday morning.

Mills said the “denial” of their relationship was “because he killed her.”

Officers also noticed “cuts” and “abrasions” on Heck’s forehead and elsewhere on his body, Mills said.

Meanwhile, they were still looking for Amalfitano. Cell phone location data ultimately led to a rift and will play an important role in the evidence against Heck, according to prosecutors’ statements.

How researchers found Cynthia Amalfitano

Detectives were able to track them as they headed back into northern Delaware and the area of Carousel Park in Pike Creek, Mills said. That’s where officers found Amalfitano’s body. The medical examiner said it showed signs of strangulation and ruled that the cause of death.

In court documents not referred to during Monday’s first day of trial, police investigators noted that one of Amalfitano’s relatives said the two had separated a few weeks before her death and that Amalfitano said he pushed her and was “scared of her to live’.

Documented in another incident in New Jersey court records, Police said Heck threatened to burn Amalfitano’s hand with an electric stove in 2022. In another incident that year, Heck was accused of pushing Amalfitano and charged with offensive touching before the case was dismissed. according to Delaware court records.

Heck was arrested a week after the murder.

What defense will argue for Stephen Heck

In his opening statement, Molly Dugan, his attorney, told the jury that prosecutors will only offer “circumstantial evidence” if they “ask you to jump to conclusions that (Heck) intentionally caused her death.”

She emphasized that there are examples of evidence that was not properly examined, there is no video of what happened and there are no witnesses who saw what happened.

If Heck is convicted of first-degree murder, he faces a mandatory life sentence for the killing.

Contact Xerxes Wilson at (302) 324-2787 or [email protected].