Narcy Novack
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Narcy Véliz Novack (born 1956) is an Ecuadorian-American woman convicted of orchestrating the murders of her husband and mother-in-law in 2009. She is serving a life sentence.
Biography edit
Novack was born Narcisa Véliz Pacheco in Ecuador in 1956. She met millionaire hotel owner Ben Novack Jr. while working as a stripper under the name "Sylvia" and they later got married. They remained married for 19 years; however, their marriage was marked by fights and accusations of adultery, with Ben Novack once accusing his wife of trying to poison him. One particular incident in 2002 saw Ben Novack beaten up, robbed of $370, 000 and held hostage by his wife, who claimed it was role-play and part of the couple's bizarre sex life. No charges were brought.
Novack also attracted her husband's ire with her lavish spending, once getting breast implants and then claiming to have simply woken up and found that she had them. Eventually, in 2009, Novack heard rumours that her husband was having an affair with pornographic actress Rebecca Bliss. Worried that this meant he was planning to leave her, preventing her from inheriting his fortune when he died, she decided to stop him.
On April 5, 2009, Ben Novack's 86-year-old mother Bernice, a beneficiary of the Novack estate, was found dead in her home in Fort Lauderdale with serious head injuries. The cause of death was declared an accidental fall. Then, on July 12, Ben Novack was found dead in his penthouse suite at a Hilton Hotel in Rye Brook. He had been tied up with duct tape and his eyes had been gouged out before he was suffocated and bludgeoned to death. Novack was interrogated about her husband's murder, admitting that a pair of sunglasses found at the scene were hers. Despite this she was not initially charged with her husband's murder and was able to claim money from the Novack estate despite her children's attempts to block her on the grounds that she was suspected of killing their father. However, journalist Julie Knipe Brown was suspicious due to reports of strange men patrolling the area in the days before Bernice Novack's death, an anonymous letter dismissed as fake by police from someone claiming to have killed Bernice and Ben Novack and a trail of blood through Bernice Novack's house house. Brown ran a story in CBS News exposing deficiencies in the investigation but local police ignored her.
However, the FBI took a closer look at the anonymous letter and were lead to three men - Joel Gonzalez, Denis Ramirez and Alejandro Gutierrez-Garcia - who were confirmed by phone records to be present at the hotel when Ben Novack was murdered. Gutierrez was arrested and soon confessed that he and the other two men had murdered both Ben Novack and his mother on the orders of Narcy Novack and her brother Cristobal Veliz. All were soon arrested. Gonzalez and Ramirez confessed and further implicated Novack and Veliz. They claimed that Veliz, at the behest of Novack, had paid them to kill Bernice and Ben Novack and had also arranged the trip to Ben Novack's hotel room, where Narcy Novack had let them in and watched as they murdered her husband. Further investigation also found that Narcy Novack, after the murder of her husband, had plundered $100, 000 from her husband's company and laundered it with help from Veliz.
Novack and Veliz were charged with murder, money laundering and domestic violence. They attempted to blame Novack's daughter May, but the testimony of their accomplices, who had pleaded guilty, was enough to convict both. Novack was sentenced to life without parole and is incarcerated at the Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution.