Between August 1992 and July 1993, three people were killed in Allentown, in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. Joan Burghardt, a 29-year-old nurse's aide, was beaten to death in August 1992. Charlotte Schmoyer, a 15-year-old high school student who delivered newspapers, was abducted on her route and stabbed to death on June 9, 1993. Jessica Jean Fortney, a 47-year-old grandmother, was strangled and beaten in July 1993. Between the second and third killings, a woman was attacked in her home and survived.
The man convicted of all three murders was Harvey Miguel Robinson, who was 17 when Joan Burghardt died and 18 when the others were killed, according to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He lived near each of the crime scenes. He was caught at the end of July 1993, after police guessed that he would go back to the house of the woman who had survived and put an officer inside to wait for him.
In November 1994 a Lehigh County jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death for each. Two of those death sentences were later set aside, one of them because he had been a juvenile at the time of the killing. The third, for the murder of Jessica Jean Fortney, has survived more than 30 years of state and federal appeals. In February 2026 Pennsylvania's corrections secretary set an execution date, and Governor Josh Shapiro answered it with a reprieve, as he has said he will do for every person on the state's death row.
The court record gives only an outline of Robinson's early life, drawn mostly from the evidence offered to spare him the death penalty and from later appeals. At the 1994 penalty hearing his lawyer described an abusive, alcoholic father, a poor upbringing, few good role models, and the use of drugs and alcohol. Friends and four relatives testified that they did not believe he was guilty and described him as normal and a loyal friend, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recorded in 2013. Robinson himself did not testify, although his penalty-phase lawyer said he had begged him to.
He attended Allentown public schools. The school records later became the center of his appeals. They showed, according to the experts who studied them, a full-scale IQ score of 126 when he was six, in 1981, and a score of 100 when he was fourteen, in 1989. His later lawyers' experts called it a drop of 26 points overall and 42 points in verbal performance. The records also showed that he had been inattentive in class and placed in special classes because of his behavior.
By his early teens he was in the juvenile justice system. He was living at Harbor Creek, a juvenile placement facility, when the second IQ test was given at fourteen, and he later earned a high school diploma while placed at St. Gabriel's, another juvenile facility, according to one of the psychologists who examined him. Before the murders he had also been convicted as a juvenile of a felony assault on a schoolteacher, which prosecutors later used to show a significant history of violent felonies.
He was detained in a juvenile placement facility for an unrelated offense from September 1992 to May 1993, the federal district court found. That stretch fell between the first killing and the second.
Joan Burghardt was 29 and worked as a nurse's aide, WFMZ-TV reported. She was found dead on August 9, 1992, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote that she had been dead "for some time" by then. She had been beaten to death, the courts found. The federal district court recorded that the killer appeared to have entered her apartment through a window.
Robinson was 17. The killing was unsolved for almost a year. Serology and DNA testing later matched biological evidence from the scene to him, the federal district court wrote in 2020. At trial the jury found that her murder had been committed during another felony and found the aggravating circumstance of torture, a legal finding under Pennsylvania's death penalty statute.
In September 1992 police stopped Robinson in a traffic stop while he was driving his mother's car, a blue Ford Tempo with damage on its right side. The stop meant nothing at the time. Two years later prosecutors used it and a second stop to tie him to the car. That same month he was placed in a juvenile facility, where he stayed until May 1993.
Charlotte Schmoyer was 15. She was a student at Dieruff High School and delivered newspapers, WFMZ-TV reported. On the morning of June 9, 1993, she disappeared from her route, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court described her as abducted while delivering papers. She was found dead in Allentown later that day. She had been stabbed to death.
The investigation that followed produced the first witnesses to see the blue car. A city employee saw a blue four-door Ford Tempo with damage on its right side parked in the area that morning, and a carpenter saw Robinson driving a blue car nearby, according to the federal district court's summary of the trial evidence. In June 1993 police had also stopped Robinson in the same car, the second of the traffic stops prosecutors later relied on.
The physical evidence came later. DNA and hair evidence linked Robinson to the case, and examiners matched the pattern of one of his sneakers to evidence in her case, including marks on her Walkman headset, the federal court wrote. The jury found the torture aggravating circumstance in her case as well.
On June 28, 1993, less than three weeks after Charlotte Schmoyer's death, a woman was attacked in her Allentown home. She survived the attack, the federal district court recorded. She identified Robinson as her attacker.
The record shows that the attack followed the same pattern as the killings, in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's words, and that Robinson entered her home unlawfully three times in all: on June 28, again on July 18, and a third time on July 31, 1993.
Her case was the one that ended his freedom.
Jessica Jean Fortney was 47, and WFMZ-TV described her as a grandmother. She was found dead in Allentown on July 14, 1993, two weeks after the attack on the surviving woman. She had been beaten and strangled, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote. DNA from the evidence collected matched Robinson.
Robinson told the court through his appeal lawyers that he was 18 years and seven months old when she died. Hers is the murder for which he remains under sentence of death.
After the first two attacks on the surviving woman, Allentown police decided the intruder would try again. Officers were stationed at her home. At about 1:25 a.m. on July 31, 1993, a man came in through a window. Officer Brian Lewis confronted him, the two exchanged gunfire, and the intruder got away through a door, the federal district court recorded. WFMZ-TV reported that the intruder was shot.
About two hours later, at around 3:30 a.m., Robinson arrived at a hospital with fresh wounds. Officer Lewis identified him as the man he had faced in the house, and the woman also identified him. He was arrested. His mother's blue Ford Tempo was linked to him through that hospital visit, and blood found in the car was later identified as his.
A search of the house where he lived turned up a ski mask, gloves, a striped shirt, sneakers, blood evidence and a .380 handgun. The gun had belonged to the woman's household before it went missing, and a cartridge from it matched casings found in her home after the shooting, the federal court wrote. Officer Lewis identified the clothing and the sneakers as those the intruder had worn.
Police interviewed Robinson on August 4, 1993. He told them that he never drove the Ford Tempo except to look for work, a statement the federal district court later described as contradicted by the evidence at trial: the two traffic stops, the hospital visit, the witnesses who saw the car near the Schmoyer scene, and his own blood inside it.
Prosecutors filed charges against him in October 1993 and February 1994, according to the federal court's summary. The three killings were charged in three separate criminal informations in the Court of Common Pleas of Lehigh County: No. 55 of 1994, No. 56 of 1994 and No. 58 of 1994, each charging criminal homicide for one of the three deaths.
The courts' summaries of the evidence rest on DNA and serology from all three killings, the hair and sneaker evidence in the Schmoyer case, the gun and clothing found at his home, and the identifications by the surviving woman and Officer Lewis. The federal district court also recorded that Robinson lived near each crime scene during the relevant periods, except during his months in juvenile placement.
The case of the surviving woman was resolved first. On February 28, 1994, Robinson pleaded guilty to three counts of burglary, two counts of attempted criminal homicide and two firearms counts arising from his three entries into her home and the shooting on July 31. He was sentenced to 40.5 to 81 years in prison, the federal district court recorded.
His defense later complained that the prosecution had not told him in time that a key witness had been hypnotized before testifying, and that she had at first suggested another man as her attacker. In 2021 the federal court rejected that claim. Because Robinson had pleaded guilty to the offenses against her, and because the evidence of his guilt on the murders was, in the court's words, "clearly overwhelming," the discrepancies did not matter to the outcome.
The three murders were tried together before a Lehigh County jury. Robinson's lawyers asked for separate trials and argued that news coverage had saturated the local jury pool; both requests failed, and the publicity claim was rejected again in federal court, which found the coverage largely factual and the time between the crimes and the trial long enough for it to cool. Carmen Marinelli represented him at the guilt phase and James Burke at the penalty phase.
The trial began on October 10, 1994. On November 8 the jury found Robinson guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. It also convicted him of related charges, which the Third Circuit later described as one count of rape and multiple burglary and other counts.
The penalty phase followed at once. The prosecution argued that Robinson was a danger who would kill again if he were ever released. It called him "a territorial predator" and told jurors, "when he gets out, ladies and gentlemen, watch out," according to the Third Circuit's account of the record.
The defense case for life rested mainly on one expert. Burke called Dr. Robert Sadoff, a forensic psychiatrist, who diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and alcohol abuse. Burke told the court years later that he chose to put the diagnosis before the jury because the prosecution would have brought it out on cross-examination anyway, and he used it to explain the course of Robinson's life. Family members and a friend spoke for him.
During deliberations a juror sent the judge a question: "On the life in prison, is that without parole, just so we're sure?" The judge answered that this was the present law, but that the legislature might change it. The prosecution asked for a sidebar. When the judge returned, he told the jury he had misspoken. "There won't be any parole," he said. "Life is life."
On November 10, 1994, the jury returned a sentence of death for each of the three murders. In each case it found that the killing had been committed during another felony, that Robinson had a significant history of violent felonies, and that he had been convicted of another murder. In the Burghardt and Schmoyer cases it also found torture. It found one mitigating circumstance in each case under the law's catch-all provision, pointing to his family background and environment, his use of alcohol and drugs, and his school history. The court formally imposed the sentences on November 29, 1994.
The judge's first answer to the juror would become the last major issue in his appeals, three decades later.
Robinson's post-sentence motions took years. The trial court held evidentiary hearings in 1998 and 1999 and ruled on June 29, 2001. It upheld the death sentence for the Fortney murder but vacated the death sentences for the Burghardt and Schmoyer murders and ordered new sentencing in those two cases. The Commonwealth did not appeal that ruling, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recorded.
Robinson appealed the rest. On direct appeal he raised about sixty issues. On December 30, 2004, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed all three first-degree murder convictions and the death sentence for the Fortney murder, finding that the sentence had "overwhelming record support," in the words of its later opinion. The decision is reported as Commonwealth v. Robinson, 864 A.2d 460 (Pa. 2004). The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear his case in 2005.
Robinson had been 17 when Joan Burghardt died. On April 25, 2006, a life sentence was imposed in the Burghardt case because he was under 18 at the time, under the Supreme Court of the United States decision in Roper v. Simmons, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recorded. He had been 18 at the two later killings, so Roper did not reach them.
The Schmoyer case was settled by agreement. Late in 2012 the prosecution and the defense reached a deal, and on December 14, 2012, a life sentence was imposed in that case as well. WFMZ-TV reported in 2026 that he waived his appeal rights in the Schmoyer case in exchange for the life sentence.
WFMZ-TV also reported that he was resentenced again for the Burghardt murder in 2019, after court rulings on sentences for juvenile offenders. Court papers describe the present Burghardt and Schmoyer sentences in different ways.
With the Fortney death sentence affirmed, Robinson turned to Pennsylvania's Post Conviction Relief Act. He filed a petition on his own on August 3, 2006, and lawyers filed an amended petition on August 2, 2010. The Lehigh County court heard four days of testimony in December 2010.
The new lawyers argued that his trial team had failed him at sentencing by never looking into the fall in his IQ scores, which they said was a sign of brain damage. Dr. Ruben Gur, a neuropsychologist, testified that Robinson had frontal lobe damage that impaired his executive functioning, and he said the damage came from development before a 2006 assault in prison. Dr. Daniel Martell, a forensic psychologist who spent seven hours with Robinson over two days, also found frontal lobe damage and called the drop in IQ significant. Prosecution experts disagreed. Dr. Thomas Swirsky-Sacchetti found only mild impairment and put the lower score down to test anxiety and limited schooling, and Dr. Timothy Michals said he would not have sent Robinson for testing in 1994 even with the school records in hand.
The key question was whether the trial team had given the school records to Dr. Sadoff. Sadoff testified that he was "one hundred percent positive" he had never seen them, and that he would have recommended brain-damage testing if he had. Burke testified that he had obtained the records by subpoena and that "I know we gave it to him." The PCRA court believed the lawyers, and it found that the case for death was so strong that more mental health evidence would not have changed the result. It denied relief on June 21, 2012.
On December 27, 2013, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed in an opinion by Chief Justice Castille. It said it could not disturb the lower court's finding that the records had reached Sadoff, and it held that presenting the antisocial personality diagnosis had been a reasonable strategy. It also declined to extend the rulings that bar execution of intellectually disabled people and of juveniles to people with severe brain damage, holding that the post-conviction statute gave it no power to create a new constitutional right. The case is Commonwealth v. Robinson, 82 A.3d 998 (Pa. 2013).
Two justices wrote separately. Justice Saylor agreed that Robinson had not shown prejudice but said he had difficulty accepting that the defense strategy was reasonable. He called the mitigation case "paltry" and connected its weakness in part to penalty counsel being new to homicide cases and appointed about a month before trial. A second concurrence shared his doubts about presenting the diagnosis.
Robinson's federal habeas petition, filed on March 24, 2014, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, raised fourteen claims. Among them were the sentencing-counsel and brain damage claims, the hypnotized witness, the refusal to hold separate trials, pretrial publicity, jury selection and the exclusion of minority jurors, evidence of other bad acts, prosecutorial misconduct, a refused continuance for a mitigation witness, and the judge's answer to the jury about parole.
Judge Joseph F. Leeson Jr. denied the petition on September 8, 2020, after what he called a review of "the extensive pleadings and the voluminous state court record," and he declined to issue a certificate of appealability. He denied Robinson's motion to reconsider on June 10, 2021. On the parole question, he found that the trial judge's later instruction was enough.
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals agreed on August 30, 2022 to hear one issue: whether the judge's remark that the legislature might change the parole law violated Simmons v. South Carolina, the Supreme Court case holding that when the prosecution argues a defendant's future dangerousness, the jury must be told if he would never be eligible for parole.
The appeal was argued on November 28, 2023, by Eric P. Motylinski of the Federal Community Defender Office for Robinson and by Heather F. Gallagher of the Lehigh County District Attorney's Office. On April 4, 2024, a panel of Judges Jordan, Hardiman and Bibas affirmed the denial of relief, in an opinion by Judge Bibas.
"In weighing life and death, a jury must understand its options," the court began. A jury may not sentence a defendant to death "because it falsely fears that he might one day be paroled." The court noted that the prosecution had raised Robinson's future dangerousness, which entitled the jury to understand that he could not be paroled. But it held that the judge's correction, "Life is life," cured any error before the jury decided. The state court's ruling was therefore not an unreasonable application of federal law. The decision is reported as Robinson v. Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, 97 F.4th 985 (3d Cir. 2024). The full court denied rehearing on July 16, 2024.
Robinson's lawyers asked the Supreme Court of the United States to take the case on October 15, 2024. They argued that a judge who tells a capital jury that the parole law might change undermines the protection Simmons gives, and that the Third Circuit had substituted its own reasons for the state court's. The Lehigh County prosecutors opposed the petition. The Supreme Court denied it on January 21, 2025, ending the regular appeals in the Fortney case.
On February 23, 2026, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections announced that Secretary Laurel Harry had signed a notice of execution for Robinson, setting the date as March 24, 2026. The department explained that when the governor does not sign a warrant of execution within the period the law sets, the secretary of corrections has 30 days to issue a notice of execution.
Governor Josh Shapiro then issued a reprieve, WFMZ-TV reported on March 24, 2026. His proclamation repeated his earlier pledge: "I will not authorize any execution warrants during my tenure," and "I will issue a reprieve in every instance." Pennsylvania has not carried out an execution since 1999, and Shapiro has kept in place the moratorium his predecessor, Tom Wolf, imposed in 2015, the station reported.
As of March 24, 2026, Robinson, then 51, was held at the State Correctional Institution at Phoenix in Skippack Township, according to WFMZ-TV. He remains under sentence of death for the murder of Jessica Jean Fortney, with a reprieve in place, and he is serving prison terms for the Burghardt and Schmoyer murders and a term of 40.5 to 81 years for the attacks on the surviving woman.
The sentences now in force in the Burghardt and Schmoyer cases are described in different ways in the record. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote in 2013 that a life sentence was imposed in the Burghardt case on April 25, 2006, because he was under 18, and in the Schmoyer case on December 14, 2012, after an agreement. Robinson's 2024 petition to the Supreme Court of the United States says that he was resentenced to life without parole in the case in which he was a juvenile and to life under a negotiated settlement in the other. The federal district court's 2020 opinion says the Schmoyer sentence became 35 years to life because he was a minor and that the Burghardt sentence became life without parole, which does not match his ages as given by the state supreme court; its 2021 opinion says both became life without parole. WFMZ-TV reported in 2026 that he was resentenced to life in the Burghardt case in 2019. The exact present terms are not clear from the court papers.
A five-year-old girl is listed by WFMZ-TV among the people who survived his attacks, and the station reported that he was convicted in all of the attacks. The court opinions do not describe that case or the charge and sentence in it.
The defense has long argued that Robinson suffers from brain damage, and its experts tied the damage to his childhood development. The prosecution's experts disagreed, and the state courts found that the school records were given to the defense psychiatrist before trial. No court has found that brain damage was proven, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declined to decide whether brain damage could bar an execution.
1981: Robinson records a full-scale IQ score of 126 at age six (school records).
1989: At fourteen, while at the Harbor Creek juvenile facility, he scores 100.
August 9, 1992: Joan Burghardt, 29, is found dead in Allentown. Robinson is 17.
September 1992: Police stop Robinson in his mother's blue Ford Tempo.
September 1992 to May 1993: Robinson is held in juvenile placement for an unrelated offense.
June 9, 1993: Charlotte Schmoyer, 15, is abducted on her newspaper route and found dead the same day.
June 1993: A second traffic stop places Robinson in the Ford Tempo.
June 28, 1993: A woman is attacked in her Allentown home and survives.
July 14, 1993: Jessica Jean Fortney, 47, is found dead in Allentown.
July 18, 1993: The intruder returns to the surviving woman's home.
July 31, 1993: Officer Brian Lewis exchanges gunfire with the intruder at about 1:25 a.m.; Robinson is identified at a hospital at about 3:30 a.m. and arrested.
August 4, 1993: Police interview Robinson.
October 1993 and February 1994: Charges filed.
February 28, 1994: Guilty pleas to burglary, attempted criminal homicide and firearms counts in the surviving woman's case; 40.5 to 81 years.
October 10, 1994: Murder trial begins in Lehigh County.
November 8, 1994: Guilty of three counts of first-degree murder.
November 10, 1994: Jury returns three death sentences.
November 29, 1994: Sentences formally imposed.
June 29, 2001: Trial court vacates the Burghardt and Schmoyer death sentences and upholds the Fortney sentence.
December 30, 2004: Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirms the convictions and the Fortney death sentence.
2005: Supreme Court of the United States denies review.
April 25, 2006: Life sentence imposed in the Burghardt case.
August 3, 2006: First post-conviction petition filed.
December 2010: Four days of post-conviction hearings.
June 21, 2012: Post-conviction relief denied.
December 14, 2012: Life sentence imposed in the Schmoyer case by agreement.
December 27, 2013: Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirms the denial of relief.
March 24, 2014: Federal habeas petition filed.
2019: Resentencing in the Burghardt case, as reported by WFMZ-TV.
September 8, 2020: Federal district court denies habeas relief.
June 10, 2021: Motion to reconsider denied.
August 30, 2022: Third Circuit agrees to hear the parole-instruction issue.
April 4, 2024: Third Circuit affirms.
July 16, 2024: Rehearing denied.
January 21, 2025: Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari.
February 23, 2026: Notice of execution signed, setting March 24, 2026.
March 2026: Governor Shapiro issues a reprieve.