WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — A notorious career criminal brutally beat and strangled a pharmacist and the pharmacist’s girlfriend as part of a plot to steal tens of thousands of dollars from the druggist, who had been operating a prescription drug ring and was flush with cash, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
Hugo Selenski needed about $10,000 to cover a check his girlfriend had written to purchase a house. He got that and far more, Luzerne County Assistant District Attorney Jarrett Ferentino told jurors in an opening statement that portrayed Selenski as greedy, manipulative and violent.
The trial opened nearly a dozen years after investigators found at least five sets of human remains buried in Selenski’s yard. He is charged with strangling two of the victims: Michael Kerkowski, a pharmacist who had called Selenski his best friend, and Kerkowski’s girlfriend, Tammy Lynn Fassett, who prosecutors say was in the wrong place at the wrong time when they say Selenski and a co-conspirator showed up at Kerkowski’s house in May 2002.
Selenski, 41, has pleaded not guilty to homicide, robbery and related counts. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Selenski operated in “a world of manipulation, a world of violence. You will hear it’s a world of greed. You will hear it’s a world that leaves its victims bound and broken,” Ferentino said. “What you hear will shock you. It will horrify you. And it will break your heart. But it happened.”