Ex-Boyfriend Charged In NYU Slay

The ex-boyfriend charged with killing a South African woman whose body was found in a New York University apartment faced a judge in a hospital gown, his fidgety presence beamed into a courtroom via closed-circuit television.

Michael Cordero remained hospitalized and on suicide watch during his arraignment Friday on murder charges. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Melissa Jackson ordered Cordero, 23, held without bail.

A prosecutor said Cordero had given detailed written and videotaped confessions explaining how he killed 20-year-old Boitumelo McCallum and left her body to decompose in a campus apartment.

Cordero told investigators, "I strangled her after a fight, wrapped her up and left her on the floor," Assistant District Attorney Martha Bashford said.

Cordero, who slit his wrists shortly before his arrest, sat in a tiny room next to his lawyer for the brief hearing. When it was over, he bowed his head for several seconds before being pulled out of the room by a court officer.

McCallum, the daughter of a New York University professor, was a student at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her mother, Teboho Moja, who was overseas at the time of the slaying, is a professor of higher education who has served as a policy analyst in South Africa, where her daughter was born.

Police found McCallum's badly decomposed body wrapped in a sheet in a locked bedroom Sunday after tenants noticed a foul smell.

From the start, detectives said they were investigating the death as a homicide and wanted to question the victim's boyfriend. On Tuesday, after Cordero was publicly identified as the boyfriend, he cut his wrists on a Manhattan rooftop, police said.

Police later located Cordero in a nearby grocery store and took him to a hospital. Once there, police say, he told the staff, "I tried to kill myself because I killed my girlfriend."

The medical examiner has ruled that McCallum died from "manual strangulation and smothering due to covering of face with a towel."