Carol Singer was hogtied, a white cord wrapped around her ankles and wrists, her legs bent at the knees, her arms pulled tight behind her back. She lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, one cheek pressed against the rug, her eyes closed tight, her face without expression.
That was how Cherry Hill police officer Gregory O'Shaughnessy found her on Jan. 29, 1974. And that was how, through a series of photos, she was presented to a Camden County jury yesterday.
The dramatic presentation of the crime-scene photos by Deputy Attorney General Wayne Forrest dominated the third day of the murder trial of Irving Singer, 68, who is charged in the brutal stabbing death of his former wife.
Singer sat impassively at the defense table as the photos, displayed on a video screen and in large, cardboard blowups, were shown to the jury.
Both O'Shaughnessy and Detective Lt. Richard Tomlinson, a Cherry Hill police detective who investigated the case in 1974, testified about what they saw when they arrived at Singer's home in the Willowdale section of the township.
Asked if he checked to see if Carol Singer still had a pulse, O'Shaughnessy said he had not. He knew, he said, that Carol Singer was already dead.
"I could see her throat was completely cut," he said.
Tomlinson testified that he felt her wrist for a pulse, but that there was none. He said her body was still warm to the touch when he arrived, a little before noon on that Tuesday.
Shown the pictures of Carol Singer hogtied and lying on the floor, Tomlinson said, "That is exactly as I saw it."
Even more detailed crime-scene photos - some of them graphic depictions of Carol Singer's stab wounds - are expected to be shown when the trial resumes on Tuesday. During arguments outside the hearing of the jury, Judge John A. Fratto overruled objections from Singer's lawyer, Jerrold Colton, who had tried to have some of those photos barred.
Colton argued that the color photographs of Carol Singer's bloody body were prejudicial and might inflame the jury. But Fratto said they were accurate and relevant depictions of the crime scene.
Irving Singer was arrested last December after two informants, working with the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice, traveled to Florida, where Singer had been living since the late 1970s, and secretly recorded a conversation in which he bragged about killing his former wife.
The tape of that recording was played for the jury on Tuesday. Daniel Ginsburg, the informant who took part in the conversation, is expected to testify next week.
Carol Singer, depicted by Colton as a "party girl" who dated underworld figures before, during and after her brief marriage to Irving Singer, was stabbed 42 times and nearly decapitated, according to earlier testimony.
A 14-inch butcher knife was still impaled in her back when police arrived at the home.
While the Singers had divorced in 1972, authorities say, Carol Singer, a tall, blond former cocktail waitress, moved back into her former husband's home in late 1973 while recovering from surgery.
But she apparently continued her infatuation and romantic entanglements with what Irving Singer referred to in the secretly recorded conversation as ''bubble-gum gangsters."
The prosecution has implied that was why Irving Singer killed her.
Colton, in both his opening statement and in cross-examining witnesses, has tried to shift the focus away from his client and toward any one of her gangster boyfriends.
