Spic Thief Convicted of Fatally Stabbing Retired White University Professor

Jose Diaz.

How could a man with such delightful physiognomy have committed a crime so heinous?

Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense.

The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A building handyman was convicted Monday of fatally stabbing retired Villanova University professor Carol Ambruster during a 2013 robbery in her Germantown apartment.

Jurors deliberated just 30 minutes before returning guilty verdicts on first-degree murder, robbery, and related offenses against Jose Diaz, also of Germantown. When the foreman read the verdicts, the victim’s sister, Ariel, softly wept.

Shortly afterward, Common Pleas Court Judge J. Scott O’Keefe sentenced Diaz, 48, to the mandatory term of life in prison without parole for the murder. Diaz, a thin man with shoulder-length gray hair, showed no reaction when the verdicts were read and declined to say anything during sentencing.

The jury’s decision came after a weeklong trial at the Stout Center for Criminal Justice in which a prosecutor argued the evidence against the defendant was “overwhelming.”

“He walked through her blood and tried to clean it off,” Assistant District Attorney Jason Grenell told jurors in closing arguments Monday morning. But, the prosecutor said, police investigators found that the size and tread markings of bloody boot prints from Ambruster’s apartment hallway matched a pair of size 8 Timberland boots found in Diaz’s home.

The boots appeared to have been cleaned up, but tests showed that DNA from Ambruster’s blood was on Diaz’s boots, Grenell said.

Carol Ambruster.