Original subtitles

Adrian Shelley was using an apartment in the West Village in Abingdon Square for

her office.

Shelley's husband dropped her off about 9.30 in the morning, didn't hear

anything from her all day.

He was very used to the two of them being in communication throughout the

day, so it was strange.

So at 5.45, he returned to the apartment to find what was going on. It took

moments before he discovered Adrian.

And the horror sets in.

Hello, and welcome.

I'm Jesse L. Martin.

Adrienne Shelley was an actress, writer, director, wife, and mother.

Some would say she had it all.

In 2006, she submitted the movie she wrote and directed, Waitress, to the

Sundance Film Festival.

Waitress would go on to be a box office hit and later a Tony-nominated Broadway

musical. But Adrienne Shelley would not live to see its success.

Her beautiful life was tragically cut short before the movie premiered.

This is how it really happened.

Adrienne Shelley was a 40-year-old woman living her dream.

She was fiercely loving and funny and whimsical and deep

and soulful.

Adrienne was this vibrant, vivacious, talented woman. She was a

total New Yorker. She was an actress and a screenwriter and a director.

She was maybe like 5'2", 5'3". She had like a voice, like a little voice like

that. And she was a powerhouse, driven, force of nature,

magical person who had a very clear vision of how

she wanted to tell stories about who she saw women

and girls to be.

In 2001, Adrienne Shelley met Andy Ostroy.

Andy proposed to Adrienne in Paris, and they were married.

In 2003, they welcomed their daughter, Sophie.

She was really in what I like to call the sweet spot of her life, just

excelling. She was just so immensely talented and just contributing so much

to society, married, having a daughter who she loved so much.

One of the things that Adrienne carried with her through her life was the fact

that her dad died at 40.

He died of a heart attack.

Adrienne had a real sense from the loss of her dad how to seize

the present moment.

It's entirely possible she gained a perspective that she needs to live life

to its fullest because it could disappear at any moment.

Adrian had just finished writing and directing the movie Waitress.

Don't do that again.

Okay, what? Okay, I won't.

Kiss you, you mean. No, not that. I didn't mean that.

Waitress is a quirky film about a waitress who loves making pies,

who's married to this horrible guy, and she...

gets pregnant and goes to this doctor who is really charming and really

handsome. Keri Russell starred in it. It's just a fantastic movie.

Adrian's in the movie also in a secondary role.

Listen, I have a five-minute blind date tonight with an insurance salesman named

Pete. 5'10", 37, all his hair, nice picture, loves fishing.

Five-minute date? Can't the guy pay for the whole thing?

Yeah. See, I have this idea. I'm meeting men through personal ads, but I just

give them five minutes. Whether or not we like each other, we just have five

minutes together.

She wrote Waitress while she was pregnant.

So all those feelings that are up on the screen that... jump off the screen were

exactly what she was feeling herself.

It attracted a lot of attention, and she was able to cast Keri Russell, Cheryl

Hines, and Nathan Fillion in the movie.

She was putting the finishing touches on it, and she had already submitted it to

the Sundance Film Festival.

Getting into Sundance is so huge.

for a filmmaker.

It was it. This was your big break.

This meant that you had finally made it in your industry.

And if you had a film that was selected to be screened at Sundance and then a

film that won Sundance, I mean, you could really pick and choose your

projects after that.

She was so excited for me to see Waitress.

That's what she had said. I can't wait for you to see it and I can't wait to

see you and catch up.

November 1st, 2006 started as a normal day for Adrian and Andy.

Adrian and Andy were at home together until about 9.30.

Then Andy drops Adrian off at the apartment that she keeps in the West

Village that serves as her office.

Andy dropped Adrian off at the apartment building and watched her go in, and then

he went off to work.

Everything was fine. Everything was normal.

But then, during the day, he tried to get a hold of her, and she wasn't

answering his calls.

This was very uncharacteristic of Adrian.

At 5.45 thereabouts, he returned to the apartment and, along with the doorman,

went to find what was going on.

He entered the apartment through an unlocked door that had no evidence of

forced entry.

He said that when he first entered the apartment, he knew immediately that

something was wrong. The TV was on low, and he called out for Adrian.

At first, nothing really looks amiss.

But then, when he gets to the bathroom, Andy finds Adrian's body hanging from

the shower curtain rod by a bed sheet.

I can't even imagine. I literally cannot imagine what he went through.

Of course, horror sets in. He makes a 911 call, and the police show up.

And they arrive on the scene. They verify what he saw.

There was no need for medical attention.

Detectives from the NYPD 6th Precinct, they question Andy for hours after her

death. They don't consider Andy a suspect.

They feel like it's got to be a suicide.

She has this sheet around her neck, and it appears, based upon the sheet and the

metal rod and the bathroom and her positioning, that she had taken her own

life.

My mom had to tell me, and I just remember the feeling of, like, there was

a hole that fell out underneath me. And I was just like, no, what do you mean

she's dead?

Actress, writer, director Adrienne Shelley was a 20-year veteran of the

independent film scene.

You okay, sweetie?

She co-starred, wrote, and directed Waitress. But while she waited to hear

if it would play at the Sundance Film Festival, tragedy struck.

It's a horrible thing.

I mean, it's a tragedy.

She had a three-year-old daughter. She had a husband. She had the family. The

whole thing couldn't be any worse.

Everything seems to indicate that it was a suicide.

There is no sign of forced entry.

Nothing appears to have been taken. No one was in the apartment. No one

remembers anything weird going on in the building that day.

This assumption that she had taken her own life was so horrific

and so impossible.

And that was what somehow leaked to the press.

I had to wrap my brain around it, and what everyone was trying to do was...

To understand, wait, did I misunderstand every single conversation we've ever

had? Did we not fully grasp? Like, was something happening that I didn't know?

The office of the chief medical examiner of New York did an autopsy.

They concluded that those neck compressions were consistent with a

hanging.

Apparently, this appeared to be a suicide to them.

My wife, Adrienne Shelley, did not.

Kill herself. There are emails, phone conversations that took place almost up

until the time of the tragedy itself.

I mean, within minutes probably, where she was making plans with our friends

for the weekend in emails, with dropping off things to our daughter's school.

This is someone who was at the peak of her life.

She was creating. She was writing screenplays.

She was so in love with her daughter. She had such a happy marriage.

There was no way she was going to kill herself.

He just said, I will not let Sophie grow up thinking that her mother wanted to

leave her.

And he said, I am determined to find out what really happened.

There's a few people in this world that leave all kinds of good vibes in their

trail, you know, and she was one of them where she'd just walk in a room.

And everyone loved her and everyone wanted to be around her and felt good

when she left.

Adrienne, like so many women, had dated other guys and it didn't work out. And

she had some bad breakups and just thought, I know my guy is out there

somewhere. And he was.

And she met him in a place that for her was very unlikely in online dating.

She tried it and found Andy Ostroy, the man she ended up marrying.

They fell madly in love and they found each other's soulmate.

Adrienne, of course, was this independent woman. She wanted to have it

all, be married, have a career, be a director, be a screenwriter, but also be

a mom.

But she was...

that she might lose some of herself by becoming a mother,

something that I think a lot of women think but don't really verbalize.

But this was on her mind. Is this other little person going to take away?

And, of course, when Sophie was born, she fell madly in love, and

all those worries went away.

It is not uncommon for suicide victims' families to not believe it for an

extended period of time.

It is not uncommon for them to want to deny it and try to advocate for someone

to look stronger and to more evidence and work harder on a particular case.

God bless her husband, Andy, who made it his mission immediately

to kill that...

assumption by very clearly going to find a forensic expert that was not attached

to the police.

Andy continued to push for answers, and so he hired his own independent

pathologist, Dr. Michael Bodden, to perform his own autopsy of Adrian.

And of course, most of the viewers would know Bodden from his roles in different

cases over the years, renowned throughout the United States. And

Michael Bodden.

was of the view that this was not a suicide.

In fact, it was a homicide.

Death was something that was on Adrienne's mind all the time.

She actually thought she was going to die young.

Adrienne's father passed away when she was 12, and this had a huge impact on

her life.

I think Adrienne faced a lot of pressure because of her father's death and

because of her own nervousness about not being around long enough to complete

everything that she wanted to complete, to achieve everything that she wanted to

achieve.

Adrienne took his nickname, Shelley, as her surname. She always said he was the

most incredible creative influence on her life.

So even though she carried that sadness, Of his death with her, she also had a

piece of him with her as she pursued her dreams.

As a child, Adrienne would tell stories to her family and put on shows.

But she always said the most enjoyable thing when I'm acting is storytelling.

Adrienne went to Boston University. She enrolled in college as a journalism

major.

but very quickly switched over to film production and broadcasting.

In her junior year, she suddenly decides to drop out of college and move to New

York to become an actor. She said, absolutely, this is my calling. And she

was emphatic that she knew it would be really difficult.

I am.

absolute respect for anybody who decides they want to be an actor or a writer or

a poet, because that's part of what makes New York, New York.

But she decided that she would completely work her tail off to do this,

no matter what.

So she applied for and went to almost every interview that she saw in

Backstage Magazine, and it eventually paid off. She was eventually recognized

and selected by Hal Hartley.

In 1989, Adrienne starred as Audrey in Hal Hartley's indie cult film, The

Unbelievable Truth.

It was Adrienne's very first starring role in a film.

What is it? Hear it?

Bombs? Could be.

Nearby?

No.

They wouldn't drop a bomb on the weekend, would they?

I think that people really took to her because...

of a couple things.

Adrienne had a great presence on screen, but she was also so filled with joy and

passion for her work that I think that that transcended the screen.

The next film she made with Hal Hartley was Trust, and once again, she just

blossomed. He was amazing in front of the camera, and audiences fell in love

with her.

Dad, give me $5.

I'm a pretty young lady. I've had just about all I'm going to take.

Mom, what's he talking about? Give me $5. Listen to your father when he's

talking to you.

Well, what's he talking about? You know damn well what I'm talking about. Maria,

you've been thrown out of school. I was not thrown out. I quit. Now give me $5.

I could completely relate to being a young woman coming to New York City and

wanting to make it no matter what. You are going to work and work and work

until you achieve what you want to achieve.

I just loved how tenacious she was and how she just worked.

So incredibly hard.

I remember being like, oh my God, everything's happening for her.

My wife, Adrienne Shelley, did not kill herself.

Andy knew from the very beginning that his wife wouldn't have killed herself.

And he continued to fight.

It was truly incongruous and cruel.

to make an assumption that this woman, who was found in this most horrific way

in her office, had taken her own life when there was no world in

which that could have been possible.

Andy was consistent that this was not a suicide, and as a result, he got a hold

of... Dr. Michael Bodden, and his autopsy was based on probably a little

bit more focus, looking for things that he would expect to find in a violent

crime.

One of the things that Dr. Bodden seemed to be stuck on was the fact that he felt

that there was bruising and there were other types of injuries that would be

indicative of a struggle in a fight.

And he was able to uncover bruising to the face, including one over the eye,

and then...

Injuries to the hands that would be consistent with fighting.

Now, these are small things, and they can be overlooked, but the fact that

Biden found these things was much more valuable to the detectives than you

could actually imagine because they're actually kind of at odds with the

information that originally came out from the medical examiner's opinion.

And as a result of that, you saw detectives digging in even further.

to find out what really happened to Adrienne Shelley.

Actress, writer, director Adrienne Shelley's body was found in the bathroom

of her New York City office.

For days, her death was reported to be a suicide.

But Keri Russell tells me no one believed that was true.

We all had to go to the funeral. With that being the only information, I was

so angry.

I was so angry. It was so hurtful to the family. It was hurtful to everyone who

loved her.

Welcome back to How It Really Happened.

Adrienne Shelley was living the life she always wanted. She had a rewarding

career, a loving husband, and a beautiful young daughter.

Initially, authorities believed her death to be a suicide, but they soon

learned that nothing is what it seems.

The detectives call Andy back in, and they want to question him about the knot

that was used to tie that bed sheet.

If it was questioned about whether it was a homicide or a suicide, one thing

I'm sure they would ask her family and friends is, you know, did she know how

to make a knot like that?

They preserved the knot that was used to suspend the victim. And this is another

thing that's very important because the knot can tell you a variety of different

things. That knot was unique enough so that the detectives went back and talked

to Andy and showed that knot to him.

And they asked, did Adrian have any experience in tying knots? And he said,

no. Did she have any experience in kind of tying that particular kind of knot?

He said, no, of course not.

And you have to ask, would this person know how to do this? Or is it something

that would be outside of their knowledge base?

Which is an important thing to establish also, because I don't know how to tie

the knot that I'm going to hang myself with. There's no hanging.

As detectives were looking through the apartment, they noticed that there was a

footprint on top of the toilet lid.

There was also a footprint on the edge of the bathtub and also on the floor.

And they photographed and preserved these prints. They even removed that

toilet seat lid and logged it into evidence for future analysis.

When you say to yourself, well...

Why would there be a footprint on the toilet seat when it wasn't her foot

size? It could not be explained because in checking the shoe prints on Adrian's

husband, Andy, along with the super from the residence and any of the other first

responders, they didn't find anybody that had those same patterns on their

shoes.

If you have multiple footwear impressions, like one was on the toilet,

one was on the bathtub, now if it's a left and a right, you can...

start to create the theory of was this person standing and balancing themselves

in this position, one foot on the toilet, one foot on the bathtub, and why

would that be?

So it seemed unusual, although it didn't necessarily mean it was a murder, but

it's something that couldn't be ignored.

Detectives find an expert who analyzes that shoe print and determines that it

matches a Reebok sneaker.

When they went back and did the revisit, they managed to notice that there was

sheetrock dust on the floor outside of the apartment in the hallway.

Apparently this dust was unique enough where they didn't see it at any of the

other entrance doors to the apartments on that floor.

Once you find something outside of the parameters of the crime scene, in this

case the impressions left in the sheetrock dust, you look and see, is

there enough characteristics from the developed print in the hall to the

developed print inside the apartment?

And that made...

tell you we should be expanding the search not just to her family that we're

trying to eliminate but maybe we need to start going through the building and

talk to neighbors and say all right do you happen to own this pair of shoes can

we take an impression of it etc we've got to determine where that dust came

from so in a combination of interviews that they did throughout the building

they found out that there was a renovation taking place in apartment

number 37

directly below the apartment where Adrian Shelley was found.

The investigators then went down there and started looking at footprints in the

dust around that apartment.

They'd found a footprint that matched one of the footprints that was found in

Adrian's apartment, and it was a Reebok sneaker.

So, of course, this spurs the interest of the detectives who had those shoes.

So now the search continues.

How many times does 52 go into 22,000?

I have no idea.

I don't do math. I do art.

Yeah. See, because it's just that I want to give Linda a race.

She has four kids, and the guy that she lives with doesn't work either, so...

In 1991, Adrian goes to L.A. to shoot Big Girls Don't Cry, They Get Even.

She exploded as this indie actress darling, and there was a lot

of pressure to be sexy. She knew what her boundaries were and

was not interested in being naked on screen and was not buxom and was not

going to get breast implants.

At the time, Me Too was so far away from happening, and Adrienne knew that she

wanted to go through her career with a certain level of self-respect.

She was dealing with continuous sexism.

Adrienne wanted to be in control of her own projects.

Hollywood wasn't easy.

For a woman in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was still very much a man's

world. And Adrienne knew that if she wanted to make the kinds of projects she

wanted to make as an actress, that she had no choice but to write them herself

and direct them herself. Otherwise, they weren't going to get made.

But at the time, it was considered unacceptable for a woman artist to be an

actor and a director and a producer and truly be in control.

She grew tired of waiting around for somebody to give her an opportunity. And

being Adrienne, she jumped right in and said, you know what? I'm going to write

and direct my own movie.

So the first movie she directed was Sudden Manhattan.

Maybe you're just a man representing nothing at all but weirdness and lies

and a half-formed, not at all justifiable feeling of hope leading

nowhere to nothing.

What a great pain.

And who wants that, huh?

A lot of it was based on her own life and her own stories. And I think you can

see in that screenplay a lot of things that come later. The sex in the cities,

all of the romantic comedies. And Adrienne was really early in saying a

woman's life in Manhattan, a woman's life in her 20s, that matters. And this

is a story worth telling.

I'll take you there with Shelley's second feature film.

It was an unconventional romantic comedy starring Ally Sheedy as a woman who

kidnaps a man who rejected her. And there was all of a sudden this heat

about her work and her voice. When she was eight months pregnant, she began

writing Waitress.

She knew that she was on the cusp of something really great with this movie.

I was like, this is it. I'm telling you, this is where you're going to, like,

explode as a director.

Like, this is everything.

I'm A.J. Hammer in New York. Showbiz Tonight has the last on-screen moments

of a promising actress making her mark as a director.

She was on the path to making it big, very excited about the movie she was

finishing. She even put herself in the movie, but her life was tragically cut

short.

You can imagine the excitement of the detectives when the shoe print expert

tells them that the print documentation that they did in the construction area

was essentially the same shoe print that was present at the crime scene. So, of

course, a combination of interviews with the person who was responsible for

hiring the crew and having the people work there led the detectives to a

basement apartment in Brooklyn.

When they went to the apartment, there was a variety of different people that

were there.

According to police, when they're at that home and they're questioning the

construction workers in the basement, one of those workers volunteers to let

them look in his backpack, which includes some work clothes but also some

sneakers. Those sneakers were Reeboks, about the same size and the

same tread pattern that was present not only at the scene but also at the

construction site.

The owner of those Reebok sneakers turned out to be a 19-year-old immigrant

from Ecuador by the name of Diego Pilko. He was in the country illegally.

Diego Pilko was a part-time construction worker who was living in the basement of

his employer's home along with his brother and his cousin.

And people who knew him seemed to describe him as a person who was just

quiet and a gentleman.

According to Diego, he and his family owed more than $13,000 to those who had

arranged his illegal entry into the United States.

And he was supposed to work in the United States and send money home to his

parents. He immediately told the detectives that, yes, he was working

construction there in apartment 37, but he didn't know anything at all about

what had taken place.

He had a lot of excuses, and he said he had nothing to do with her death.

When Diego Pilko tells the detectives that those shoes are his, that puts the

detectives in a position where they can now detain Diego Pilko and take him down

to the station for a more in-depth interview.

Diego denies having anything to do with Adrian's death.

He says that he was at the building and then he left because he had a

stomachache and he went to the drugstore to get medicine.

When he came back, the boss was outside the building and he told him and his

buddy that they'd been reassigned to go work at a different building in Midtown,

where he says he spent the rest of his afternoon.

But it was lucky that they had experienced detectives who had done

interviews and interrogations like this in the past.

One of the lead detectives on the case, Irma Rivera Duffy, notices that Diego

Pilko has a prayer card in his hand as they're questioning him.

And she focuses on this and capitalizes on it. She asks him if he has any

children of his own or perhaps some nieces and nephews. And he admits that

he does have some nieces and nephews. In fact, he has a niece.

almost the same age as the victim's daughter, Sophie.

Rivera Duffy pushes this, plays on his Catholic guilt, and tells him that if he

has done something wrong, that his niece will pay for his sins.

Diego Pilko confesses.

Happening in America this morning in New York, a possible break in the case of

the death of actress Adrienne Shelley. A construction worker is now under arrest.

He's charged with her murder.

Shelley, she was seen in the movie Trust, was found hanging in her

Greenwich Village apartment.

The construction worker now under arrest. His name is Diego Pilko.

After he admitted to killing Adrienne,

He said that he did it in a fit of rage, that he was working, he was minding his

business, and then she came downstairs and yelled at him for making too much

noise. She was working and he was making noise. He says she swore at him and was

really loud and really angry.

He apparently claimed that he slammed the door on her. She reopened the door

and gave him some more grief.

And then he was concerned that she was going to call the police.

And what possibly would result in him being deported. So he then followed her

back up to her apartment.

And then he got mad.

And they got into a fight.

And she fell on the ground.

He claimed he got into a physical confrontation with her, gave her a big

shove. She went backwards, hit her head on a table.

And then Diego says what he does is he puts his head down.

to her chest, to listen for her heart.

You've got to be figuring that Diego's heart is pounding the hardest it's ever

pounded in his whole life.

If he did that, what he would hear would be his own terror.

And by trying to listen to a heartbeat, by putting his ear to her chest, he

couldn't hear a heartbeat. He thought he had killed her, inadvertently, as an

accident. So he constructs this idea of staging a suicide by putting a sheet

around her neck and suspending her from the shower rod to make it look like she

killed herself, not knowing that he was leaving his shoe prints behind at the

scene. Adrian died from strangulation from being hung.

She was alive when he hung her from the shower rod, which is absolutely

terrifying and disgusting.

The detectives learned that Diego, unlike Adrian, absolutely knew how to

tie a knot like the one that was on Adrian's neck.

He had grown up on a farm in Ecuador, and it was the same knot that he used to

use to tie up the hogs on the farm.

Diego's account of what happens as he's confessing to Detective Rivera Duffy,

it's good enough for her because it's a confession, but there are certain things

that are just out of sync that he's really probably...

Making up.

Most of it has to do with the fact that Adrienne accosted him.

I was horrified for Adrienne that her life was robbed from her. I think about

that a lot because of the stranger that robbed her of living.

It eventually came out that what happened was Adrian did not come at him.

She did not complain. She was not cursing at him. It was something that

was totally out of character for Adrian anyway.

He admitted that he was in the apartment because he saw an opportunity to steal

from her.

He goes into apartments.

He looks for money. He gets money. He leaves. In this particular occasion, he

goes into this apartment. He sees a purse.

He then takes money or whatever he does out of the purse. There's an encounter.

She allegedly, according to him, sees him doing that. She then confronts him

and at the time threatening that she's going to call the police.

His story is he pushes Michelle.

She then, he says, bangs her head, falls down, is apparently dead. By Diego's

account, he gets a bed sheet tied a knot around her neck. And what does he do?

He drags her into the bathroom.

And by his account, he decides he's going to stage a suicide.

I don't think he ever really put his head on her chest to hear her heartbeat.

He was in full-blown panic mode. She has passed out. When she comes to, he will

call the police.

It's just a matter of time before he's discovered.

So, although he is by no means a sophisticated criminal,

He has seen something on a telenovela back in Ecuador where somebody commits a

murder and stages it as a suicide by hanging somebody with a bed sheet.

A guy who's so cold is to, like, take a person and kind of make

it look like they hung themselves?

I mean, that's total dedication to not being blamed for what you did.

Adrian was killed in November 2006, and waitress went

to Sundance that January, and it was absolutely heartbreaking because people

loved the movie.

We're very excited to be here because Adrian would, this is what she was

hoping to get in Sundance.

So it's bought at Sundance, and then it comes out nationwide.

And it made about $19 million at the box office, which for an indie movie is a

lot of money.

It brings up so many emotions because you want to celebrate how great the film

is and how great her work is.

And then there's another part of you that makes me so angry, like that

somebody took her life.

I remember seeing Andy in the theater and talking to him.

And he was...

So incredibly heartbroken, you could tell, but also so proud of his wife and

so proud of what she had achieved. And I think he just felt her spirit there with

him in that room.

To know Adrienne was to understand innately that she was meant to be a

trailblazer. Her storytelling was trailblazing, and I really feel like

Adrienne set a path.

For people like Greta Gerwig and everyone who

worked as a writer, director, actor after her.

Adrienne Shelley's film Waitress was by far her greatest hit, a huge success at

the Sundance Film Festival.

So it's no surprise that in 2016, Waitress the musical debuted on

Broadway.

What's so exciting about Waitress, the musical, to me, is that Adrian,

as a creator, gets to live on.

And people who might not see the film go to this musical and then read about

Adrian Shelley and then go back and see the movie and see her work and learn

more about Adrian.

So there's sort of this full circle, sweet, magic.

But it doesn't surprise me that Adrienne's legacy and momentum lives on

for other creators. And that feels really right.

It was nominated for multiple Tonys. It had songs written by the incredible

songwriter, Sarah Bareilles.

And it just became an incredibly beloved play.

Andy has been the key to all of this.

Andy's the reason that Adrian's murderer was caught and brought to justice.

And Andy is also the reason that her legacy lives on today.

I think that, you know, she's still part of the vibrancy of the city. And she's,

you know, she's shown the way where there's going to be some other young

woman who's going to say that, you know, I really want to do something. And

they're going to know about her and they're going to follow her example.

Be inspired by her.

I just miss my friend all the time. I wish I could have one more day with her.

No, I wish I could have a million more days with her.

If I had wishes, then I would go for the million.

I think the movie has a really lovely heart.

I really like putting that sort of thing out.

That's important to me.

And it is a love letter to my baby.

What's really poignant and made me cry is at the end of Waitress the movie,

Sophie, her daughter, is in the movie.

And at the time,

they didn't know just...

what kind of impact this was going to have.

There was no world in which Adrienne ever would have wanted to wave goodbye

to Sophie, but the fact that that is captured in that last scene

is this incredible, strange, prophetic gift to her love

of Sophie. And the film itself is a love letter to Sophie that is so oddly...

Remarkably meaningful and necessary because all she would ever want for her

daughter is to know that she loved her with her whole soul.

Diego Pilko is serving a 25-year sentence without parole in Cook

Sake Correctional Facility in New York.

Adrian Shelley's legacy lives on in her daughter Sophie and in the Adrian

Shelley Foundation started by her husband, Andy.

To date, more than 50 women filmmakers have been awarded scholarships and grant

money to support their education and pursuit of the arts, a cause very close

to Adrian's heart.

I'm Jesse L. Martin.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.