The dangerous mistake gutsy women make: when a guy pulls an obnoxious move--like stealing your prime parking spot--it's natural to want to confront the jerk. After reading this, you'll see it's safer to hold your tongue. Plus, warning signs a stranger may get violent.

Like many women these days, New York actress and filmmaker Adrienne Shelly wasn't one to suffer rudeness or mistreatment in silence. So when her work in the New York City apartment she used as an office was interrupted last November by loud construction noise, she went downstairs to complain.

Shelly apparently confronted a construction worker, a 19-year-old Ecuadorian illegal immigrant named Diego Pillco, in the apartment below hers and told him to keep it down. According to Pillco (there were no witnesses), their argument escalated to cursing and shoving.

When Shelly went back upstairs, Pillco later told investigators, he feared she would call the police and he would be deported. So he followed her, and they exchanged punches. He then pushed her, causing her to fall and slam her head on a table. Thinking she was dead, he panicked and dragged her to the bathroom, where he rigged up a scene to look as if she had hung herself from the shower rod with a bedsheet. In fact, she died not from the blow but from the hanging.

His ploy almost worked: The police at first assumed it was suicide, though her family insisted they were wrong. Then investigators noticed an unexplained footprint on the toilet seat next to the shower. They matched it to a print at the construction site, which led them to Pillco. He told details of the crime to police, telling them that he tied her the way he had tied pigs on the farm in Ecuador (he later pleaded not guilty). Shelly left behind a 3-year-old daughter, a grieving husband, and a burgeoning career in independent filmmaking.

Her story shocked New York and the country, not just because of its brutality, but because many young women could imagine themselves in her place. Who hasn't complained about noise coming from the apartment next door, flipped off a ...