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SUNY Geneseo Stabbings A Crime Of Passion — Suspect Called Dad Before Killing Himself

By Shelley Hazen
Published on: 08:01 PST, Jan 19, 2016

Early Sunday morning, mere steps from the SUNY Geneseo campus, Colin Kingston, 24, walked to the upstairs bedroom of a rental house with a large knife in hand. He was headed to the bedroom of his ex-girlfriend, Kelsey Annese, and found her — likely still asleep — next to another man. What happened next likely happened fast — a brutal, personal, and violent stabbing that left the two young people dead.

After it was done, Colin called his father. He said he’d hurt Kelsey and was thinking about killing himself. He hung up and his father called 911, the New York Times reported. By the time police arrived at the rental house, all three youths were dead. Colin had stabbed himself with the same knife.

In the small New York town where everyone either attends SUNY Geneseo or works there, the stabbing has stunned students returning home from winter break, and left residents — as the Buffalo News put it — with knots in their stomachs. The stabbing is the first murder in the small village in decades.

“Here, in the cornfields, with just a bunch of college students, it was really kind of shocking,” said SUNY Geneseo freshman Taylor Johnson. “That just seems so unlike Geneseo. It’s a little frightening.”

Both Matthew, 24, and Kelsey, 21, were students at the school, both of them athletes. Kingston is a local boy, the Kingston family is prominent and connected in one way or another to everyone in town, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle noted.

A recent breakup between Kingston and Annese may have sparked the violent stabbing; they dated for three years. Police said Colin bought the knife at a local Walmart on Thursday, and when he came to the house on Wadsworth Street at 6 a.m. Sunday, he didn’t force his way in.

And none of Kelsey’s four roommates, from SUNY Geneseo’s men’s and women’s basketball team, heard anything, said police spokesman Officer Jeffrey Szczensiak.

“It occurred in a small area, the bedroom. (There is) no indication that we can say there was an actual struggle that took place. We believe that it was something that probably happened very quickly.”

Once he was in his ex-girlfriend’s bedroom, police don’t know whether there was a struggle, or if Annese and Hutchinson were sleeping when they were attacked. But they do think there was some kind of fight, and during that fight, the SUNY Geneseo students were fatally stabbed.

After the stabbing, police found the back door open, and the front of the house still adorned with Christmas decorations. Before the stabbing, Colin had made suicidal comments to some people, but never threatened anyone, and police had no record of previous incidents between him and Kelsey.

The stabbing did reveal the markers of a crime of passion, said forensic psychologist and domestic violence expert Charles Ewing.

“A knife is a pretty personal weapon to kill someone with. It’s not easy to kill someone with a knife. Usually, there’s something very emotional going on when someone kills someone with a knife. It’s not the cold, detached kind of killing that you see with a gun.”

SUNY Geneseo students and village locals remember the two victims fondly as they try to make sense of their violent deaths.

Annese was from Webster, New York, and studied education and Spanish at SUNY Geneseo; she was on the basketball team. Her coach, Scott Hemer, called her a “team favorite.” A native of British Columbia, Hutchinson studied geography and played defense on the men’s hockey team; he also had been a volunteer at the local fire department for three years. The fire chief, Andrew Chanler, called him “very kind and open.”

As for Kingston, he had been a student at SUNY Geneseo but left the school in 2012 and didn’t graduate. His basketball coach in high school, Andrew Chanler, called him his favorite, and the team’s “toughest guy … Just a very physical kid. A farm kid, you know?”

Students are now left to open their spring semester in grief, the stabbing casting a pall over the college and its small town. Lucio Accorso, a junior, described the atmosphere as “pretty terrible… just because the way it is in Geneseo, you almost always know somebody who knows somebody. And that was definitely the case (here).”

[Photo via YouTube]

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