A former Navy prosecutor was convicted Thursday of killing and dismembering his wife in 2022.
A Liberty County, Georgia, jury deliberated for about an hour before finding Nicholas Kassotis guilty on 12 counts, including malice murder and felony murder, Coastal Courier reported. Superior Court Judge Paul Rose sentenced him to life without parole plus 25 years, to be served consecutively.
The jury found that Kassotis killed Mindi Mebane Kassotis and then cut her body in to pieces, disributing the parts throughout land used by a hunting club that stretched over three counties.
“This is truly a heinous crime,” Rose told the killer during sentencing, noting the “web of lies” Kassotis told his wife, including the introduction of a man he simply made up — “Jim McIntrye” — who he said controlled the couple’s moves and bank accounts.
“You write fiction – and your life was a fiction, at least the last six to seven years,” Rose said. “And then you carried out a brutal, horrific, gruesome murder of Mindi.”
Hunters found Mindi Kassotis’s torso on December 2, 2022, at the Portal Hunting Club in Riceboro, 2025. Other parts of her body were found on the following days.
Law enforcement initially had no idea whose remains had been found — Mindi Kassotis had not been reported missing, and Nicholas Kassotis had told her family she died in a hospital.
The remains were eventually identified via familial DNA, and Kassotis was arrested in May 2023, by which time he had changed his name to Nicholas Stark, remarried, and moved to Pennsylvania. That new wife, Samantha Kolesnik, sent a victim impact statement that was read in court after her husband was convicted, CourtTV reported.
“I feel raped by him … I was not allowed to consent to a romantic and intimate relationship with Nicholas because he lied about his entire identity,” said Kolesnik, who said she had met Kassotis online and that he had lied and said his wife and child had died two years prior. “There was no opportunity for true consent.”
Kassotis’s parents begged for mercy, saying their son could not have committed such a brutal crime.
“We feel incredible sympathy for (Mindi’s family),” said Linda Kassotis. “Nicholas was not responsible for this; we know him to be a kind and gentle person.”
But Mindi Kassotis’s family was especially harsh.
“You are a pathological liar,” her sister-inlaw, Megan Mebane, said. “You are a psychopath and a sociopath. You thought you were so much smarter than everyone else. You have forever changed the meaning of trust for me and my family.”
“You have no remorse for what you did,” she continued. “You deserve to sit in prison for the rest of your life and think about Mindi every day.”
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[Featured image: Nicholas Kassotis/CourtTV screenshot and Mindi Mebane Kassotis/Georgia Bureau of Investigation]
