No Body, No Jury: Judge Bulone Finds Kosowski Guilty Without a Body, Then Finds Two Aggravators

Steven Cozzi walked into the Blanchard Law firm at 8:37 on the morning of March 21, 2023. He was carrying his lunch. He was wearing a red sweater. He was getting ready for a 10:30 hearing in a lawsuit he had been winning for months, against a plastic surgeon who had fired his own lawyer and was running the case himself. No camera ever saw Steven Cozzi walk out. No one has ever found his body.

Three and a half years later, on Day 7, both sides stood up in a Pinellas County courtroom and closed on that same missing thing. The State said a man whose whole life stopped at 9:50 that morning is dead, and that the pile of evidence around the missing part proves who killed him. Tomasz Kosowski, defending himself against the death penalty, said a death never proven is a murder never proven. There was no jury to hear either of them. Kosowski gave that up long before trial. There was one man on the bench, and he was the only one who had to be convinced.

Less than twenty minutes after the last word of argument, the clerk read the verdict form Judge Joseph A. Bulone had signed: "The defendant is guilty of murder in the first degree as charged."

That was not the end of the day. It was the middle of it. By the time court adjourned, the same judge had re-examined Kosowski's decision to go without a lawyer, taken his signature a second time on a waiver of a penalty jury, listened to five people speak for Steven Cozzi, heard the State ask for death, and found two of the three aggravating factors the State alleged. The third, that the killing was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel, he rejected, and the reason he gave is the whole case in one sentence: "the most important piece of evidence is the body. Obviously, there was no body here."

No sentence was imposed. The only two sentences the law allows now are life in prison without parole or death, and the judge will choose between them after a Spencer hearing set for October 8, 2026, at 9 A.M. What follows is how the day got there, what the court decided, what it has not decided yet, and the question I cannot put down after watching it.

"So basically you rest"

The evidence closed in about two minutes. Judge Bulone asked Kosowski whether he would call any witnesses, put on any evidence, or testify himself. Kosowski said he had already presented his evidence. The judge asked what he meant. Defense Exhibit One, Kosowski said, a photograph he had brought in while cross-examining a State witness. The judge confirmed he would introduce nothing further. "So basically you rest, okay."

Neither side had a problem with the jury instructions, which is a strange phrase to write about a trial with no jury. The instructions exist anyway. In a bench trial the judge still has to apply the same law a jury would be told to apply, and Judge Bulone had written his own set for this case. He walked everyone through the ladder he would climb down. First-degree murder if the State proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. If not, second-degree murder. If not, manslaughter. If not, not guilty. He reminded both sides that closing argument is not evidence, that nobody could introduce anything new, and that the State would get to speak first and last, but only last if Kosowski spoke at all. Then he told the State to proceed.

"Steven Cozzi's dead. And this man did it."

Assistant State Attorney Nathan Vonderheide opened with the whole case in two sentences: "Your Honor, Steven Cozzi's dead, and this man did it."

He spoke for about an hour and a half. The two words he kept coming back to were "methodical" and "systematic," and he used them for both sides of the story. Kosowski, he said, methodically and systematically planned a murder over at least three and a half months. The detectives, crime scene specialists and analysts who caught him worked methodically and systematically too, knocking on doors and pulling surveillance video one business at a time until the trail led to a garage in Tarpon Springs.

Then he went straight at the thing this case has been named for since Day 1. There is no body. Vonderheide said Kosowski "thinks it's a technicality that we don't have a body," and that Florida law answers him. In a homicide case with no body, the State can prove death through what he called the cessation of a pattern of life. He listed who proved it. Michael Montgomery, Steven Cozzi's husband. George and Lois Cozzi, his parents. And Tiffany Gorman, the financial analyst who never met him and learned him through his bank records: a man of habit whose card swipes clustered around a Circle K, a Starbucks, a Dunkin' Donuts and a Publix near his work and his home, and then stopped.

On Day 6 Kosowski had pointed to charges on Cozzi's accounts after March 21, subscriptions and online purchases, as signs of life. Vonderheide took that on before Kosowski could raise it again: "there is zero evidence that Steven Cozzi is alive after 9:50 in the morning on March 21st of 2023." He asked the judge to "table that element" and move on.

What came next was a history of a lawsuit. It sounds odd to spend a murder closing on a civil case, and Vonderheide said so himself, but the State's whole theory of motive lives there. Kosowski sued a group of corporate defendants in 2019. Steven Cozzi represented them. In May 2022 Kosowski's lawyer left the case and Kosowski became his own lawyer. The case filled with discovery fights. The judge presiding over it, now-retired Judge Patricia Muscarella, testified earlier in this trial that she appointed a special master to sort the discovery out. The fights were settled, and a hearing on the defendants' motion for summary judgment was set for May 2, 2023. Attorney Jacob Pillsbury, who represented another defendant in that suit, testified that Cozzi was going to win it.

Vonderheide then set a calendar next to the lawsuit. On December 10, 2022, Kosowski ordered a red Gorilla cart, a heavy-duty wagon, to his home in Miami. On December 12, the same morning Cozzi and Pillsbury traded texts in evidence about how angry Kosowski had gotten at a hearing, Kosowski first reached out to Marc Otto about buying a Toyota Tundra. On December 16 he ordered a blue Gorilla cart to his home in Tarpon Springs. No blue cart was ever found at either house. On December 26 he paid Otto cash for the truck and told him he was "a kayaking enthusiast" who would register it in the summer. He never registered it. Two days later he filed an objection in the civil case asking for Cozzi's removal from it and demanding $51,250 in fees.

Then the deposition. On January 26, 2023, at the Blanchard Law firm, Kosowski took a deposition that everyone who was there described as heated. When Cozzi went to the small men's room during a break, Kosowski followed him in. Cozzi told a colleague by text within minutes that Kosowski had called him a scumbag. Jake Blanchard, Cozzi's boss, had testified that he burst into the room ready to pull Kosowski out, and that Cozzi calmly told him not to.

That evening, Vonderheide said, at 6:51 P.M., Kosowski was home and searching for where Steven Cozzi lived. "There is zero legitimate purpose to searching where your opponent lives personally." The next weeks came off Detective Lance Moore's download of Kosowski's phone and cloud account: searches about Gorilla carts and their weight capacity; on February 16, a photograph Kosowski took himself of Michael Montgomery's car parked at the couple's home; on February 22, a video of the law firm's parking lot, Cozzi's car in it, that ends when the phone drops at the sidewalk Cozzi walked every morning; on March 2, public-records and background searches on Cozzi and Montgomery, down to their wedding.

As the State laid out the rest: on March 7, the firm's guest Wi-Fi logged Kosowski's phone inside the building, and the cleaner Debra Henrichs caught a man peering through the firm's door. March 14, Kosowski left his phone at home, and Henrichs caught a man in the electrical closet around the corner from Cozzi's office, followed him out to a Tundra, and watched him leave a boxed wagon behind. His fingerprint was later found in that closet. March 17, St. Patrick's Day, the Wi-Fi logged him inside the building again for about three minutes. And at 3 A.M. on Monday, March 20, the day before Cozzi disappeared, his phone searched a paralytic drug called succinylcholine, its duration of action, and an academic article on injecting it into muscle.

The ninety minutes nobody saw

Here is the part of the State's closing I want every reader to sit with, because it is the most honest thing a prosecutor said in this trial.

Vonderheide walked the morning of March 21 minute by minute. At 7:51 Kosowski left his house in the Tundra, wearing a New Jersey plate the police never found. At 8:07 his phone filed one more motion in the civil case. At 8:08 the phone went off. At 8:32 the Tundra backed into a space at 1501 South Belcher Road. At 8:34 Kosowski walked into the building with a box on his shoulder that the State says was a wagon. At 8:37 Steven Cozzi walked in. And then the prosecutor told the judge where the State's knowledge ends.

"From 8:34 to 9:50, I can't tell you what he was doing in that law firm."

At 9:50, the door record from the building's security system shows Cozzi's office door opening for the last time. His phone was on his desk playing music, his keys and wallet beside it, an email up on his screen that he never finished sending. About the next half hour, Vonderheide went further. He said he could not "tell you precisely what this man did in that bathroom. I can't." Because there is no body.

What he offered in place of certainty was everything around the window. Blood that the State's analysts say was Cozzi's, low on the wall by the urinal, inside the stall, under the toilet seat, in the floor drain, and on napkins in a trash can witnesses said was never that full. A swipe of Cozzi's blood mixed with Kosowski's DNA on the outside of the bathroom door, which he said is exactly where a man's arm would press while holding that door open to pull a wagon through it. He conceded he could not give the judge a volume of blood. "That's not how crime scenes work," he said. "That's not how real life works."

At 10:22, surveillance shows Kosowski leaving in different clothes, pulling a wagon the State says was heavy. At about 10:28 his phone came back on, and here is the fact that has always sat at the center of this case: he used it to dial into the 10:30 hearing in the civil lawsuit, the one Cozzi never showed up for. The FBI's Special Agent Kevin Corrigan placed that phone, stationary, in the firm's parking lot for the length of the call. The State's version is that Steven Cozzi was in a wagon beside the truck while the man who put him there argued his motions. After the call the phone went off again, and the State says the video shows Kosowski struggling for about ten minutes to get the wagon into the truck bed.

Kosowski had asked, more than once during the trial, for a demonstration in the courtroom of whether a loaded cart could even get up onto that tailgate. Vonderheide addressed it directly. If there were a jury, he said, maybe he would do one. For this judge, he called it "histrionic and unnecessary." He pointed instead to the medical examiner, Dr. Jon Thogmartin, who testified it could be done, to Cozzi's blood on the tailgate, and to bruises and scrapes on Kosowski's arms, stomach and knees that he said match the wagon's frame.

Then the drive. Kosowski, Vonderheide pointed out, had a roll-up cover on that truck bed and never closed it. That is why surveillance cameras up Belcher Road, a bus camera, a gas station and a plate-reading camera could follow a wagon under a red covering in an open truck bed all the way to his street in Tarpon Springs. Cozzi's blood mixed with Kosowski's DNA was later found in the middle of his garage floor and in the trunk of his Toyota Corolla. That evening the Corolla drove south, and the State's timeline puts it at a dumpster near Loop Road off the Tamiami Trail in Collier County at about 9:30 at night, bracketed by plate-reader hits around 9:10 and 9:36. Two nights later, the State says, Kosowski drove back to that same spot, turned around and left.

The last stretch of the closing was about what police found when they stopped the Corolla on March 25. "$282,100 is an interesting find in his car," Vonderheide said. Two passports, one American and one Polish. Masks, duct tape, tasers, brass knuckles, knives. A vial of succinylcholine and a needle. A ballistic vest in the trunk with Cozzi's blood on it. Then video of Kosowski in the back of a police car, told a warrant to examine his body was on the way, working his cuffed hands from behind his back to the front and cleaning under every fingernail.

Two moments from that closing deserve to be on the record in fairness to the prosecutor. Early on, Vonderheide withdrew a phrase the State had used all trial for the bag found in Kosowski's car. "It's not a murder kit. I'm not going to call that anything. I'm not going to say that anymore. We're done with that. It's his tools." And the two concessions about what he could not see were his, offered without being asked. A prosecutor who had just walked a judge through a stack of evidence that high did not need to volunteer where it ran out. He did anyway.

He ended on the presumption of innocence itself. "The time for the presumption of innocence is over," he said. "That cloak that protects him in the presumption of innocence from mere allegations from myself and Ms. Spadaro, it's ripped off now." His last line: "There's only one box to check in this case, Your Honor."

"Reasonable doubt exists in droves"

After a fifteen-minute break, Judge Bulone asked Kosowski whether he wanted to give a closing argument. He did.

It lasted about twenty minutes, and it was organized the way a lawyer would organize it. He took the three things the State has to prove for first-degree murder, that Steven Cozzi is dead, that Kosowski's criminal act caused the death, and that it was premeditated, and he went through them in order.

On the first, he made four points. "My first point is that Steven's body was never recovered in this case." Second, there is no death certificate: "Now the state had three and a half years to get a death certificate in this case, but it didn't." Third, charges kept landing on Cozzi's cards after March 21, into mid-April, including an Amazon Prime Video charge on April 17 that he said appears nowhere else in Cozzi's records. Fourth, nobody knows what happened in that bathroom. He reminded the judge that the bloodstain analyst said the pattern was consistent with a shooting, a stabbing, an assault, a fall, or a nosebleed, and could not say how much blood was lost. "If you don't have a mechanism of death," he argued, you cannot show blood loss inconsistent with life.

When Kosowski told the judge that not all of Cozzi's credit cards were in the wallet found in his office, the State objected that the point was not in evidence. Judge Bulone did not sustain or overrule it. "I'll evaluate it," he said, and let Kosowski keep going.

On the second element, Kosowski said the State's theory was physically impossible. He argued that the wagon's wheelbase is much shorter than the height of the Tundra's tailgate, so the only way to get a loaded cart onto it is to deadlift the whole thing straight up, 32 inches, with about 200 pounds in it. Maybe an Olympic lifter could, he said. And he said the prosecutor knew it, "and that is why he refused to lift up that cart yesterday."

Then the clock. The State objected when Kosowski began reading Special Agent Corrigan's testimony from a transcript. The judge overruled it: a transcript, he said, is going to be a lot more accurate than memory. So Kosowski read the agent's own words back, and did arithmetic with them. His phone was at the law firm from 10:24 to 11:03, and the truck left at 11:16. "We know from court records that I was in a telephonic hearing from 10:27 to 11:03," he said, "and I would suggest that it is impossible for me to kill anybody while I'm on a telephonic court hearing." That left five minutes before the call or thirteen after it, in a busy office complex on a Tuesday morning, with a veterinary clinic steps away and nobody hearing a thing, and, he added, without leaving a speck of his DNA inside the bathroom.

He did the same at the dumpster. By Corrigan's numbers, Kosowski's phone was at the Loop Road intersection at 9:33 and 9:34 that night, and a plate reader four miles away caught his car at 9:36. "That means I traveled four miles in two minutes, equating to 120 miles per hour in those two minutes." Inside that, the State needed him to turn off, stop, unchain a dumpster, lift a body three or four feet and chain it back up. The simpler story, he said, is that he drove straight past at 80 miles an hour, which he called "embarrassingly fast" and far more believable.

Premeditation, he argued, only matters if the first two are proven, and they were not. Then he closed on the thing the State could not produce. If the State's story flowed as neatly as it claimed, it had to end in one place. "If the state's theory of the murder is correct, you have to find Steven Cozzi's body in that landfill. But they didn't." Excavators, surveillance video, a multi-agency team, dogs, drones, and nothing.

He raised one more point from earlier in the trial: photographs showing no paper debris outside the bathroom in the morning and paper debris there by evening. "What if the evidence was planted?" he asked, and said the prosecution never answered it. "Reasonable doubt exists in droves in this case."

And then he did something I did not expect from him, in a trial where he has argued almost entirely in facts and numbers. "While I've been defending myself, I made mention of Steven Cozzi as a body several times. Steven Cozzi is fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of Jesus. I sincerely apologize to the Cozzi family for referring to Steven in this manner."

I want to be careful with that moment. It is not an admission of anything, and nobody should read it as one. It was a man who has spent seven court days arguing about a body apologizing to a family for talking about their son that way. His argument is his right, and so was that.

"The only conspiracy in this case"

Because Kosowski spoke, the State got the last word, and the rebuttal took about six minutes.

Vonderheide went at the 120 miles an hour first. The location data at the dumpster "is an estimate," he said, and both experts put a stop there of at least a minute. He asked the question Kosowski had not answered: if he never stopped, why did he drive back to that dumpster two nights later?

He went at the hearing math next. Nobody, he said, claims the killing happened in the five minutes before or the thirteen after the hearing. The State's timeline puts it between 9:50 and 10:22, while the phone was off, and the phone came back on after Kosowski walked out. On the charges after March 21, he said the testimony was that Cozzi's wallet and cards were left at the firm, that his in-person card swipes stopped on March 20, and that a man alive in April would have left more than a Grammarly update and a streaming bill. No food, no coffee, no word to his husband or his parents.

On the planted-evidence suggestion he used one line, and it is the line people will remember from the rebuttal: "The only conspiracy in this case is this man's own sloppiness against himself." The phone he had to turn on for the hearing. The plate flipper he installed and did not use. The truck-bed cover he did not close. The napkin outside the bathroom, he said, most likely blew out of an overflowing trash can, "because napkins move," and if it did, that only puts the mixture with Kosowski's DNA inside the bathroom. On the tailgate, he said the truck was backed in over a bump in the ground of about 12 inches, so the lift was shorter than Kosowski claimed.

One man goes back to decide

Before he left the bench, Judge Bulone told the room what kind of decision he was about to make. After a motion hearing, he said, a judge makes findings of fact, lays out the law and applies one to the other on the record. A jury does not. It goes back, deliberates, and checks a box. "So, in order to be consistent with that, even though I would love to go over all of the facts and the law and apply the law to the facts, I'm going to check the box that I think is appropriate, and that's going to be about it."

Then, with a dry line nobody in that room missed: "So I don't anticipate me disagreeing with myself that much." He called a fifteen-minute break.

When court came back, the clerk read the form. "The court, as a trier of fact, having considered testimony and evidence presented at trial, the exhibits admitted into evidence and the applicable law hereby enters the following verdict. The defendant is guilty of murder in the first degree as charged." Rendered in open court, the 23rd day of September, 2026, signed by Judge Joseph A. Bulone.

That is the top rung of the ladder he described that morning, the finding the State asked for, and the only verdict that could open a penalty phase. Kosowski is no longer presumed innocent of this murder. A court has found him guilty of it. Everything from this point forward is about what happens to him.

The judge's first question after the verdict went to the State. "State, are you still seeking a sentence of death in this case?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

Three decisions, and he would not take the hour

Judge Bulone did not move straight to the penalty phase. He stopped, and he told Kosowski that he was glad they were about to break for lunch, "so that he'll have some time to think about this because obviously this is important."

He laid out three decisions. First, a penalty phase is what the law calls a critical stage, so if Kosowski still wanted to represent himself, the court had to run another Faretta hearing. That is the inquiry, named for a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court case, a judge must make before letting anyone give up a lawyer: does he understand what he is giving up, is he competent to do it, is he doing it freely. Second, on August 31 Kosowski had signed two separate jury waivers, one for the guilt phase and one for the penalty phase, and the judge said plainly that he could change his mind now. Third, mitigation. The evidence a defendant can offer about his life, his character and his circumstances that argues for a sentence less than death.

On that third point the judge explained what he had already done, and it deserves full credit. Kosowski had said he did not want to present any mitigation, but he had also said he did not have a death wish. The rules, the judge said, make a comprehensive presentence investigation mandatory when a defendant is seeking death for himself and refusing to present mitigation. Kosowski had not asked for death. The judge ordered the investigation anyway, "in an abundance of caution." And he used his discretion to appoint a special counsel, a lawyer who represents neither side. In the judge's words, "he's not the state counsel, he's not the defense counsel, he's the court counsel," and he can present mitigation for the court to consider even if the defendant will not.

Then he asked whether Kosowski wanted time.

"No, Your Honor, I'm prepared to answer all of them right now."

Did he still want to represent himself? "Yes, Your Honor." Did he still want to go without a jury? "Yes, Your Honor." Did he want to present any mitigation at all? "No, Your Honor." Would he argue for life during closing, or at any time? "No, I plan on making no closing arguments."

Four answers, and each one took something off his own side of the table. I am going to say this plainly because it matters for everything after it. Those are his choices, and they are his right. A competent adult has a constitutional right to defend himself, to waive a jury, and to decline to put his own life story in front of a court. Nobody in that courtroom took those things from him. He handed them back, one at a time, in less than a minute.

The whole warning, a second time

The judge ran the Faretta inquiry again from the top, under oath, and he did not shorten it because they had done it before. "This may seem a little repetitive," he said, but it is what the law requires.

He offered to reappoint Kosowski's former lawyers, Jane McNeill and Daniel Hernandez, who "would represent you for free." He asked Hernandez how long he had been doing this. Forty-nine years practicing, Hernandez told the court, and probably thirty-nine years trying death penalty cases. The judge walked Kosowski through what a lawyer could do for him at this stage: advise him whether to testify and what he has a right not to say, handle the rules of evidence in a death penalty hearing, preserve errors for an appeal, make sure favorable facts reach the court at sentencing, and make sure any sentence is lawful. He warned him that a man who represents himself cannot later claim he was incompetent, that there would be no special treatment and no automatic continuance, that disruption could end his self-representation, and that "the state who is seeking the death penalty will not go any easier on you or give you any special treatment because you are representing yourself."

He told him there are only two possible sentences: life in prison without the possibility of parole, or death. He confirmed his age, 47, and his education, including an MBA and a medical degree, both from Dartmouth. No drugs, no alcohol, no medication, no history of mental illness, no physical problem, nobody pressuring him. "Yes, sir," to every warning.

The judge found Kosowski competent to waive counsel and found that he was waiving it knowingly and intelligently for the penalty phase. McNeill and Hernandez stay on as standby counsel. They are not his lawyers. They are there if he changes his mind.

Then the jury waiver, and here too the judge did the whole thing out loud. He read Kosowski the form. He explained what a penalty jury would have had to do: all twelve jurors would have to agree unanimously that the State proved at least one aggravating factor beyond a reasonable doubt before he could even be eligible for death, and then each juror would weigh whether the aggravators were enough, whether they outweighed any mitigation, and whether death was the right sentence. "If fewer than eight jurors recommend death, then you're not death eligible, and you would get a life sentence." Without a jury, only the judge decides.

Kosowski asked a question. "Your Honor, I signed this form two weeks ago. Was that one invalidated?"

"No, it's an affirmation."

He signed it again.

"I don't think there's really an answer on exactly how to do this"

The special counsel came forward next. The judge asked whether he could be ready that afternoon. "I would need more time, Your Honor." His recommendation was a separate Spencer hearing after the penalty phase.

A Spencer hearing, named for a Florida Supreme Court case, is the step in a Florida death case where, after a penalty jury has spoken, the judge alone hears more. The defense can put on additional mitigation that may land differently with a judge than with a jury, both sides can argue, and the defendant can speak for himself before any sentence. The judge said it himself: the hearing is mandatory, and the whole theory of it assumes a jury has already made a recommendation. "Here, when everything is non-jury, it makes it a little awkward."

The special counsel told the court that "a bench trial and a pro se defendant effectively waiving mitigation is pretty rare," and that the safest course was to track a jury trial as closely as possible. He also said something that should be written down. Now that there was a guilty verdict, he wanted to go back to potential mitigation witnesses, "for example, his mother," to see whether anyone was now willing to speak on Kosowski's behalf. He said he would be subpoenaing jail records too.

The State wanted the court to make every penalty finding that afternoon, as a jury would have, and then hold the Spencer hearing for whatever the special counsel found. The judge was not comfortable with that. "I don't think I'm gonna make a recommendation to myself." And then he said the sentence I think every viewer of this case should hear in his own voice.

"I don't think there's really an answer on exactly how to do this. There may be, but I'm not aware of it. And I did look."

He chose a middle road. Under a line of U.S. Supreme Court and Florida Supreme Court decisions he named from the bench, the fact that makes a defendant eligible for death, at least one aggravating factor proven beyond a reasonable doubt, has to be found by the finder of fact. The weighing after that can be done by a judge. So he would decide only the aggravating factors that afternoon. The mitigation, the weighing and the sentence would come later, after the Spencer hearing and any written arguments the parties wanted to file. He acknowledged this was "not really consistent with Florida statutes, but he's waived all that." Nobody objected. He told the State it would have to convince him that it proved all three of its aggravators beyond a reasonable doubt, and he broke for an hour.

I want to credit what the court did in that half hour, and then I want to ask the question it leaves, because both are true.

The credit is real and there is a lot of it. The judge offered Kosowski time to think and Kosowski turned it down. He offered two experienced lawyers at no cost, and Kosowski turned them down. He offered to let him take back his jury waiver, and read him exactly what he would be giving up, down to the eight-vote line. He ordered a full presentence investigation he was not required to order, because the man in front of him said he did not want to die. He put a lawyer on the case whose only job is to find the mitigation the defendant will not offer. And when the procedure ran out, he said so on the record instead of pretending it had not.

Now the question. Consider what the system looks like from here. One judge heard the evidence. The same judge found Kosowski guilty. The same judge, a few hours later, decided whether the State proved the facts that make him eligible for death. And the same judge will now hear whatever mitigation a court-appointed lawyer can gather from people he hopes may be willing to speak now that there is a verdict, and then decide whether Kosowski lives or dies. The whole architecture of a Florida death case assumes more than one decision-maker: twelve people who have to agree on the aggravators, at least eight who have to recommend death, and a judge who can still say no. Kosowski waived that architecture, and that was his right. But the court is now building its replacement as it goes, by the judge's own account without a clear map, in the highest-stakes decision our system makes.

I am not accusing anyone of anything. The judge did not create this situation and everything he did on the record ran toward protecting the man in front of him. My question is to the system: when a defendant facing death waives every protection that would normally stand between him and a death sentence, how much of his defense should the court build for him, and is one careful judge, however careful, enough of a check on a sentence of death?

The State asks for death

After lunch the judge handed both sides the penalty-phase verdict form, which asks only one question about each alleged aggravator: did the State prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, yes or no. He also handed out penalty instructions with the three alleged aggravators and every potential mitigator left open, "so that everybody knows what law we're talking about." The instructions say "financial gain" where the statute says "pecuniary gain," and he explained they mean the same thing.

An aggravating factor, for readers new to this, is a fact about the murder that the law says can make a death sentence available. In Florida the State has to prove at least one beyond a reasonable doubt before death is even on the table. Mitigating factors are the other side of the scale. The State alleged three aggravators, and it laid out a roadmap for each.

Financial gain. The State said the only dealings the two men ever had came through the civil suit Kosowski brought for money, and it pointed to his own filings. His December 28, 2022 objection asked for "plaintiff's fees of $51,250." His January 17, 2023 sanctions motion asked for attorney's fees, special master's fees, and to be "compensated for the hundreds of hours he spent related to this motion." Meanwhile the summary judgment motion Cozzi had filed meant Kosowski was not going to win.

Heinous, atrocious or cruel. The State relied on the testimony of Dr. Hector Vila, Jr., the anesthesiologist who testified on Day 5, that succinylcholine would leave a person unable to fight back while still aware of what was happening, and on the blood in the bathroom.

Cold, calculated and premeditated. This is premeditation of a heightened kind: a careful plan formed well in advance, with no pretense of moral or legal justification. The State dated the planning to the cash truck purchase on December 26, "85 days up until the murder," or at the latest to the January deposition, 54 days out.

The State reminded the court it only has to prove one. It said it had proven all three, and it asked the court to find that death is the appropriate sentence. Kosowski made no opening statement.

Five people speak for Steven Cozzi

Then the courtroom went quiet in a different way.

Victim impact statements are not testimony. The speakers are not sworn and nobody cross-examines them. Florida allows them at a penalty phase to show the court who the victim was and what his loss did to the people around him. They may not characterize the crime or the defendant, and they may not ask for a sentence. The State told the court it had edited the written statements to comply. None of the five asked for a sentence. Kosowski did not object to any of them.

Melissa R. Byers, the executive director of the St. Petersburg Bar Association, spoke first, as a friend and as a voice for the lawyers who knew him. "The actions made in 32 minutes, March 21st, 2023, impacted the lives of many," she began. She described a lawyer who did not fit the stereotype. "He simply loved the law." She read from a colleague's nomination of Cozzi for a 2022 Rising Star award: "prepared, meticulous, and devoted to the practice of law." She said she had emailed him the day before he went missing for his advice. And then she gave the last word to him, reading from the charge speech Cozzi gave his own graduating class at Stetson law school. "Get a picture of the lawyer you want to be. And when you've got that picture, keep it in your heart."

Jake Blanchard, who owns the firm, spoke next. For five years he worked beside Cozzi every day, and he was the best man at his wedding. In the year before he lost him, Cozzi thought about leaving for a less stressful job, and Blanchard begged him to stay. "And that haunts me to this day, and it probably always will." What he carries with him, he said, is that Cozzi eventually told him he would never have gone anyway, because they would not have let him be the lawyer he got to be at Blanchard's side. He ended "grateful to call him my brother."

George Cozzi, Steven's father, spoke remotely. He thanked the investigators, the prosecutors and the court. He described the first weeks, he and his wife sitting together in a dark room "staring at each other in dumb silence." He told the court what it might not know about his son: seven years working on Broadway before he ever went to law school, a law degree he paid for himself while commuting sixty miles a day, a clerkship with a Judge Helinger, who told George that Steven was one of the best clerks he ever had. Steven was just doing his job, his father said, advocating for his client, when he first encountered the defendant. "His murder extinguishes a bright light in the world."

Lois Cozzi, his mother, spoke in the courtroom. "It would take me 41 years, 10 months, and nine days to recount everything in my son Steven's life that mattered to me." She described the asthmatic boy who grew into a cross-country runner, the theater kid who won a state playwriting competition two years running, the day in October 2016 he pulled into a gas station to call her after passing the bar, a gas station she still cannot drive past without crying. The happiest day of his life, she said, was October 17, 2020, when he married Michael. She described the family dinners she cooked with him. "Those dinners are silent now." She told the court what her son had told the family, that a plaintiff representing himself had followed him into a restroom and called him a scumbag, and that Steven "wasn't worried." And she named the thing every family in a no-body case lives with. "We had no body to bury, no funeral, no rituals."

Michael Montgomery went last. He told the court they met on a July afternoon in 2018 at a sushi restaurant, married during COVID in a small wedding on a fall day, and built a life of hiking trips, small-town bookstores and nights playing video games together. On the morning of March 21, 2023, Steven brought him coffee in bed, kissed him on the cheek and left. The last thing he said was that he could not believe how expensive Costco was, "and not I love you."

Days before he disappeared, Steven had pre-ordered a video game for him. It arrived on May 12, 2023, the day of Steven's celebration of life, which was also his birthday. "I picked up his last gift and carried it into a house he would never come home to." He talked about survivor's guilt, about catching himself laughing and thinking "how dare I be happy," about jumping at every noise. "The most unbearable part is that we were never able to bring Steven home." And he closed on the line he opened with, turned around. "To the world, Steven may have been one person, but to me, he was the world."

The judge asked Kosowski whether he wanted to present anything during the penalty phase. "No."

The State's closing on the aggravators was short. Financial gain, it said, sits on certified court filings from the civil case. Cruelty sits on Dr. Vila's testimony and on Kosowski's own searches, which were specifically about duration of action and injection into muscle. And cold, calculated premeditation sits on a record the State called complete: the text exchange, the truck, the filings, the deposition, the personal research, the house, the parking-lot video, the closet, the searches, and the morning itself, ending on a man "lying and waiting" for Steven Cozzi to come out of his office. The judge said he would be back in ten minutes.

"The most important piece of evidence is the body"

When he came back, the judge had the clerk publish the penalty-phase verdict form. It reads, as to each aggravator, whether the court finds the State proved it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Financial gain: "The court finds that the state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the first degree murder was committed for financial gain." Yes.

Heinous, atrocious or cruel: "The court finds that the state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the first degree murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel." No.

Cold, calculated and premeditated: "The court finds that the state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the first degree murder was committed in a cold, calculated, and premeditated manner without any pretense of moral or legal justification." Yes.

A note on how I know that, because it matters. Our main transcript of the day drops two of those three answers in the space of a few seconds. The findings above come from our second, independent verification transcript of the same moment, which captured all three. I would rather tell you that than let you wonder why another source reads differently.

The form is dated September 23, 2026 and signed by Judge Bulone. He then said a few words about two of the findings. Financial gain, he said, does not have to be the sole or dominant motive for the killing. And then he explained the one he rejected.

"Everyone who's ever been involved in a murder case will tell you that the most important piece of evidence is the body. Obviously, there was no body here."

There was no confession either, he said, and in his experience defendants in death cases often talk about what they did. There was no smoking gun with the paralytic: the vial police found was full, and there was no empty vial or needle carrying Steven Cozzi's DNA, nothing that showed exactly how he was killed. "The state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Steven was murdered and that the defendant is the one that did it. But as far as exactly what happened, because of the lack of evidence, it really cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt." He added that this was "not the fault of the state at all," and not the fault of law enforcement. "It's just is what it is." It could have been a heinous, atrocious and cruel death, he said, "but that's obviously not good enough as far as proof."

That is a court holding the State to its burden at exactly the point where the record ran out, and I think it deserves to be recognized as that. The cruelty aggravator is about what the victim went through, his awareness, his fear, his pain. The State's strongest theory of it rested on a drug nobody could prove was ever used. The judge found the same evidence that convicted Kosowski could not carry that particular weight, and he said why in plain words. A court that is careful in both directions is what everyone in that room was owed.

Then the scheduling. The judge first floated October 13. The parties told him they had already agreed on October 8, with the special counsel saying that if nothing changed he would be ready by then. The Spencer hearing is set for Thursday, October 8, 2026, at 9 A.M. The judge said he would try to get courtroom one, "just in case," because he did not know how many people would come.

What the day decided, and what it did not

Three phases turned over in one afternoon, and it is easy to blur them together, so here is where things stand.

Guilt is decided. Judge Bulone, sitting as the finder of fact, found Tomasz Kosowski guilty of first-degree murder as charged. He gave no written findings for the verdict, as he said he would not, the same way a jury gives none. Florida law allows a death and its cause to be proven by circumstantial evidence, and a missing body is not a legal bar to a murder conviction. That is the question this whole case was built on, and the court answered it.

Death eligibility is decided. One proven aggravating factor is what the law requires before death is available. The court found two: financial gain, and cold, calculated and premeditated. It rejected the third.

The sentence is not decided. No sentence was imposed on Day 7, and nobody should read anything written about this day as saying otherwise. The court has not yet heard any mitigation. It has not weighed anything. The two sentences available are life in prison without the possibility of parole, or death, and the judge said that after the Spencer hearing, and after any memoranda of law, he will set a sentencing and issue an order either way.

What happens on October 8 depends mostly on people who are not the judge. The special counsel said he will go back to potential witnesses now that there is a verdict, and named Kosowski's mother as one. The judge himself floated some possible mitigating facts the State and special counsel might simply agree on, such as that Kosowski has no prior record, and mentioned his capacity to help other prisoners and his age, though he doubted 47 was all that significant. Kosowski has said he will present nothing. Whether he holds to that, whether he speaks at all, and whether anyone who knew him before March 2023 steps forward, will shape the only picture of his life the court gets to weigh.

And there is one finding the written sentencing order will have to explain, because the case for it runs through a lawsuit rather than a robbery. The classic financial-gain murder moves money toward the killer. Here the State's case is that the only relationship between these two men was a suit Kosowski brought for money, that his fee demands and sanctions motions singled out Cozzi by name again and again, and that he was about to lose. The judge found that proven and said financial gain does not have to be the only motive. How much weight he gives it, next to a premeditation finding that rests on months of searches, purchases and visits, is something I will be reading for when that order comes.

What October 8 has to answer

I started this trial with a question the case put to everybody: can the State prove a murder without a body? On Day 7 the court said yes. The State proved it the way it said it would, with a life that stopped at 9:50 on a Tuesday morning, a lawsuit, a truck bought for cash, a wagon, a phone that was on when it should have been off, blood where it should not have been, and a car with $282,100 in it. Kosowski answered with the missing body, the missing death certificate, a phone call and a stopwatch, and a court that heard all of it found him guilty anyway.

But the body mattered after all. It mattered at the one place where the question was not who, but how. Without it, the court would not find that Steven Cozzi's death was especially cruel, because nobody can say what happened in that bathroom. The judge said it better than I can.

Now the case turns to a question that has nothing to do with the body. On October 8, a man who has waived his lawyer, his jury, his mitigation and his argument for life will sit in front of the judge who convicted him, while a lawyer the court appointed tries to tell that judge who Tomasz Kosowski is. Kosowski has every right to make those choices, and the court has done more than the law required to protect him from them. What I will be watching is whether the process built on the fly for this case gives the court a full picture before it makes the one decision our system can never take back. Will anyone speak for him? Will he speak for himself? And when the order comes, will it show the weighing a jury would have done?

Steven Cozzi's family has waited three and a half years, and they still have no grave to visit. They told the court exactly what that costs. Tomasz Kosowski has been found guilty of taking him from them, and the court still has to decide what happens to him. Both of those things are true at once. On October 8 we will be there for the next part of it.

Every Part of this trial, in order, lives in the Case Story Trial Podcast playlist. If you want to judge the verdict the way the judge had to, start at Part 1 and watch the State build it.