A grieving father evoked the names of famous serial killers Tuesday when he chastised the man convicted of murdering and then sexually mutilating his son 10 years ago.
"There is a special place for guys like you, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy," Arthur Moross told Robert Nowak. "Robert Nowak, I hope you have fun in hell with them."
Nowak, 51, standing shackled and in orange jail garb, received a life sentence.
He was convicted by an Oakland County Circuit Court jury in July of first-degree murder in the beating death of Troy Moross, 26.
Moross' body was found the morning of Feb. 26, 2001, in a Madison Heights parking lot. His genitalia had been surgically removed after his death.
"I can't find words to describe the tsunami that came over our family," Arthur Moross told the packed courtroom.
Nowak, as he did throughout his jury trial in July, insisted he was innocent.
"So you think you got the right guy," Nowak told the court. "They don't. I didn't do this. Reports were falsified, documents were filed. The jury was misled. I never got a fair trial."
But Oakland County Circuit Judge Colleen O'Brien, who oversaw the trial, was not persuaded.
"For several years, I'm sure you thought you got away with murder," she said.
Nowak was linked to the killing in 2009, after DNA removed from Troy Moross' body matched DNA taken from Nowak after he was arrested for larceny in California. O'Brien, in sending him to life in prison without parole, said the community would be safer with Nowak behind bars.
"It's hard to imagine a human being treated like that by another," she said.
Defense attorney Lawrence Kaluzny argued in the week-long trial that Moross had been the victim of a sex cult operating out of a basement in a Rochester Hills home.
The cult, still under investigation by federal agencies, included sexual mutilation and torture. A federal immigration and customs official investigating the cult was subpoenaed to testify in Nowak's trial, but didn't take the stand because the case is ongoing.
The jury deliberated less than three hours before convicting Nowak on July 13.
After the sentencing, Arthur Moross praised police and prosecutors for bringing his son's killer to justice. "It was well handled," he said.
