Biography

Was working on Waitress (2007), starring Keri Russell, at the time of her murder. She was the film's writer and director.

Her killer pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Diego Pillco admitted strangling her after she caught him trying to rob her apartment. He also confessed to hanging her and staging it as a suicide. At the time he was helping to renovate an apartment in the same West Village building where she had an office. He said he panicked when she discovered him stealing from her purse and threatened to call the police.

Her death was first considered a suicide. Days later, a 19-year-old Ecuadorian construction worker confessed to slaying the actress, whom he left hanging by a bedsheet from a shower rod in the bathroom of her Manhattan office/apartment. She was found by her husband.

In her memory, her widower, Andy Ostroy. created the Adrienne Shelly Foundation--a nonprofit organization that awards grants to female actors, writers, and/or directors of short films, feature films, and documentaries. The foundation was established in 2007 after Shelly was murdered in 2006 at the age of 40. Among the films supported by a Shelly Foundation grant are the features The 40-Year-Old Version (2018), Night Comes On (2014), and Pariah (2009), and the documentaries Roll Red Roll (2018), Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017), The Wolfpack (2015), and Freeheld (2007), which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subject. The foundation also gave an early short film grant to Chloé Zhao, who eight years later became the second woman in history to win the Academy Award for Best Director.

The particulars of her murder are re-imagined and dramatized in an episode of Law & Order (1990) (1990-2010). The episode is Melting Pot (2007) (16 Feb 2007) Season #17, Episode #15.