CHICAGO—Five days after brutally beating an elderly Filipino-American woman, her alleged killer reportedly used the rings he pulled off her dying fingers to propose to his girlfriend.
Prosecutors said a neighbor discovered Virginia Perillo, 73, in a pool of blood with severe head injuries and defense wounds to her arms after being attacked in her Chicago garage on October 22. She died two days later, the Chicago Sun Times reported Friday.
Raymond Harris, 36, allegedly showed up at a party that night, showed the stolen rings to a friend and asked which ones he should use to propose.
Harris had been released from prison in May after serving 13 years of a 30-year sentence for breaking into a woman’s home, beating and raping her for several hours and setting fire to the house in 1997.
Just three weeks before that attack, Harris had been released from prison for robbing a woman at gunpoint as she parked her car outside her home.
Judge Peggy Chiampas lambasted Harris for having the “audacity” to use Perillo’s rings in his proposal and noted it was “particularly disturbing” that he kept committing violent crimes so soon after being released from prison, the Sun-Times reported.
Harris’s fiancé later turned the rings in to detectives and Perillo’s family had the grim task of identifying them.
“That’s just wrong,” son John Perillo said of the proposal.
“If you wanted to take her rings, fine. But he didn’t have to take it to another level. It’s unthinkable. She was a sweet woman. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. I hope he gets what he deserves.”
Perillo, who had immigrated from the Philippines in 1971, had spent the day of her attack attending church, buying groceries and visiting her husband in hospital where he was recovering from a stroke, her son told the paper.