Delores Gillespie (in her younger years)
HORROR: Jerome Isaac confessed to setting Delores Gillespie (pictured in her younger years) alight in an elevator. (
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The sicko who confessed to burning an elderly Brooklyn woman to death as she cowered in her apartment-building elevator is working on a plea deal with prosecutors, his attorney and law-enforcement sources said yesterday.
Jerome Isaac, 48, whose face was terribly burned in the Prospect Heights attack last year, will be offered 50 years to life in exchange for his guilty plea to murder and arson charges, sources said.
“We’re in discussions to try to get to a plea deal in this case,” said defense attorney Howard Tanner. “Whatever plea deal is struck would result in a very significant sentence.”
Tanner said he would present the deal to Isaac but would not say whether he would encourage his client to take the deal.
Assistant DA Mark Hale and Tanner were in Brooklyn Supreme Court yesterday to discuss the deal with Judge Vincent Del Giudice.
Isaac was not present but will have to appear in order to plead guilty.
Delores Gillespie, 73, described as a generous, churchgoing woman, hired Isaac for odd jobs.
But she had to fire him after he stole her kitchenware and DVD player. Isaac, who lived just blocks away, was furious because he thought Gillespie stiffed him for work he did at her Underhill Avenue apartment.
The twisted killer ambushed Gillespie as she stepped off the elevator on her floor with grocery bags from Key Food hanging from her wrists on the afternoon of Dec. 17, 2011.
The madman sprayed gasoline onto the helpless woman, used a barbecue lighter to set her alight, and then — as her screams echoed throughout the building — threw a Molotov cocktail on her.
The firebug fiend then ran to the nearby apartment he shared with his brother and tried to set it aflame but succeeded only in damaging the door frame. He fled to a nearby rooftop where he fell asleep, turning himself in to police later on.
“If the video wasn’t there, you would still be looking for me,” Isaac crowed to cops when he was arrested, court documents state.
“I hope he burns in hell!” Gillespie’s daughter wrote on Facebook after her mother’s murder.
Gillespie’s family approves of the potential deal because it would spare them a trial and the accompanying painful testimony and graphic video, a source said.
The deal will likely include consecutive sentences of 25 years to life on the murder charge and on the arson charge.
Isaac is due back in court on Oct. 29.