Trial Starts for Defendant in the Killing of Bill Cosby's Son
By CHRISTIAN BERTHELSEN
Published: June 23, 1998
SANTA MONICA, Calif., June 22— Mikail Markhasev's own words prove he shot and killed Ennis Cosby as Mr. Cosby fixed a flat tire in the inky January night, just off a Los Angeles freeway, a prosecutor said today in the opening statements of Mr. Markhasev's murder trial.
The prosecutor, Anne Ingalls, a deputy district attorney, said Mr. Markhasev described the Cosby killing as a ''robbery gone bad'' in letters from jail to another imprisoned friend, mixing English and Spanish slang. Ms. Ingalls said Mr. Markhasev also told a friend while he was trying to recover a gun from the woods that he had shot a black man: ''It's all over the news.''
Those statements will be buttressed, Ms. Ingalls said, by the testimony of two friends who were with Mr. Markhasev around the time of the killing, friends who saw him looking for news of the crime on television later that day and another friend who said Mr. Markhasev asked for help in recovering the gun.
But a defense lawyer, Henry J. Hall, said in his statement that his client was not even at the scene when Mr. Cosby was killed and that the crime was instead committed by one of the prosecution's chief witnesses, Eli Zakaria. Mr. Hall, a public defender, said the letters implicating Mr. Markhasev had been fabricated, and he attacked the credibility of witnesses against his client.
The jury of six men and six women were given two portraits of Mr. Markhasev: a man who shot Mr. Cosby during a robbery and left him lying on the road, or an innocent Ukrainian immigrant, then 18, offered up by questionable witnesses seeking financial gain or to conceal their own involvement in the killing.
Mr. Markhasev faces a possible life sentence without parole if he is found guilty of killing Mr. Cosby on Jan. 16, 1997. A weathered white cross and faded flowers still mark the site where Mr. Cosby, the son of the entertainer Bill Cosby, was killed.
Bill Cosby's fame was mentioned once this morning, when Mr. Hall asked the jury not to let the case ''be infected by the celebrity of the victim's father.''
Two rows of friends and family members of the victim sat in court, but Bill Cosby was not among them.
Ennis Cosby, a 27-year-old graduate student at Columbia University Teachers College in New York, was visiting Los Angeles. He was on his way to meet a woman around 1:15 A.M. in his mother's Mercedes-Benz, the prosecution said, when he pulled over because of a flat tire.
Mr. Markhasev had been partying at a home in the city's Bel Air section with his friends Eli Zakaria and Sara Peters, Ms. Ingalls said, before they passed Mr. Cosby. Mr. Zakaria asked Mr. Cosby, ''Hey, are you O.K.?'' the prosecutor said, and Mr. Cosby replied, ''Yeah. Everything's cool.'' Then, she said, the three went to a nearby pay telephone.
Mr. Cosby had called his friend, Stephanie Crane, on a cellular telephone and asked her to come shine her headlights on his car while he changed the tire, Ms. Ingalls said. As Ms. Crane sat in her Jaguar, the defendant appeared at her window and said, ''Open the door or I'll shoot,'' Ms. Ingalls said. Ms. Crane drove away quickly, then turned around because she had left Mr. Cosby behind.
''By that time, the defendant went over to Ennis, demanded his money, and when Ennis wasn't quick enough, shot him once at close range in the temple, killing him instantly,'' Ms. Ingalls said.
A few days later, the prosecution said, two associates of Mr. Markhasev, Chris So and Michael Chang, went with him to a wooded area to try to recover the gun, and it was then that he implied he had killed Mr. Cosby. Mr. So called The National Enquirer to claim a $100,000 reward for information about the slaying. When the police came to his home, he took them to the same wooded area, where they found the gun. The prosecution said tests showed that the gun was the murder weapon.
Ms. Ingalls acknowledged that Mr. Zakaria and Mr. Chang, both of whom are prosecution witnesses, are convicted felons serving prison sentences. She also acknowledged that Mr. So was motivated by a financial reward and also that Ms. Crane failed to pick out Mr. Markhasev in a police lineup after his arrest nearly two months after Mr. Cosby's death.
Mr. Hall referred to Mr. So as just one of the ''bottom-dwelling witnesses in this case.'' Mr. So told two different stories when he called The Enquirer, Mr. Hall said. He said the jailhouse letters that were turned over by an informer now serving time for bank robbery in a Federal prison in Texas were in two types of handwriting and had inaccuracies that would not come from someone who knew the case.
Mr. Hall showed the jury a composite sketch drawn from Ms. Crane's description of the killer, along with a photograph of Mr. Zakaria, saying the long nose and rounded chin looked more like the Government witness than the defendant. And he said that there was a 45-minute gap between the departure of Mr. Markhasev from the Bel Air home with Mr. Zakaria and Ms. Peters and the killing. He said that Mr. Markhasev was being dropped off at home during the slaying. Mr. Zakaria and Ms. Peters returned to the Bel Air home for drugs, he said, and they are the only ones who know who killed Mr. Cosby.
''Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when you get to the end of this case, the evidence will show you beyond any doubt that the real person who did this killing was Eli Zakaria,'' Mr. Hall said.