ALFRED — A jury this afternoon found an Old Orchard Beach woman and her brother guilty of murder and conspiracy for the death of the woman’s husband at their home two years ago.
It took the jury about five hours to return the verdicts against Darlene George and Jeffrey Williams at York County Superior Court. The trial lasted nine days and included testimony from 50 witnesses.
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George and Williams will face 25 years to life in prison when they are sentenced later this year. The two defendants stared straight ahead and did not react as the verdicts were read by the jury forewoman.
Winston George was strangled with a rope and suffocated with a plastic bag after returning home from work around 2:30 a.m. on June 20, 2008.
“The journey is over. We have what we want, justice,” said Whitfield George of Brooklyn, N.Y., one of Winston George’s four siblings.
After the verdict, Whitfield George and several family members gathered together outside the courthouse. He said they were crying “tears of joy so that my brother could rest in peace right now.”
Whitfield George said he hopes Darlene George and Williams are sentenced to life in prison.
“Every day that she wake, she will see some bars around her,” he said.
Darlene George claimed she and her 13-year-old son were victims of a home invasion robbery. She told police that men wearing nylons over their heads tied her and her son up in a bedroom, then killed Winston George after he returned home from work in the early morning of June 20, 2008.
But the trail of evidence led police to two New York men – Darlene George’s brother, Williams, and Rennie Cassimy, a self-described “gigolo” with whom she had been having an affair for more than a decade.
Cassimy pleaded guilty earlier this year to conspiracy to commit murder, and he was the star witness in the trial against his former lover and her brother.
The central claim of the prosecution was that Darlene George devised an elaborate plot to kill Winston George and disguise the crime as a home invasion. During the trial, Assistant Attorneys General Lisa Marchese and Leane Zainea told the jury that the Georges’ marriage had fallen apart.
Darlene George wanted her husband dead because she did not want to lose control of the properties they owned, and because she was angered by his affair with a co-worker, the prosecutors said.
“We’re very pleased,” Marchese said outside the courthouse. “Clearly the jury worked very hard and they understood this very complex case.”
Marchese said the most shocking aspect of the crime was that Darlene George subjected her teenage son, Giovanni Whiteman, to a terrifying experience.
“Giovanni Whiteman was used as a pawn by Darlene George in this entire scheme,” Marchese said. “She used him as an alibi and that was just terrible.”
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