Denise Sam-Cali woke in the night to footsteps in her house. She got as far as the front yard before he caught her and pinned her down, and when she bit his arm he beat her, raped her and tried to strangle her. A neighbor heard her screaming and he ran. Police found a butcher knife wrapped in a napkin on the floor outside her bathroom door.
Four days later he came back and could not get in; the back door had been fitted with an alarm. Allentown police concluded he would keep coming until she was dead, and put a young officer named Brian Lewis inside the house. On the night of July 31, 1993, Robinson forced the locked doors, then climbed in through a window that had been left open on purpose. Lewis identified himself. Robinson fired at him, Lewis fired back, and Robinson went out through a window and left a blood trail. Officers were ringing round the hospitals within the hour. He had already walked into Lehigh Valley Hospital to be treated.
He was eighteen years old.
Harvey Miguel Robinson was born in Allentown on December 6, 1974. His father, an alcoholic musician from Pottstown who beat Robinson's mother until she left, had been convicted in 1962 of beating his twenty-seven-year-old mistress, Marlene E. Perez, to death, and by his own account Robinson admired him. He was first arrested at nine. Teachers recorded violent outbursts. He lived in the 700 block of North Kearney Street, and every one of his victims lived on the city's east side, some of them within a few blocks of his own front door.
Joan Burghardt was twenty-nine, a nurse's aide, and she was beaten more than thirty times about the head in her apartment in August 1992. He was seventeen. Between that killing and the next he served eight months for a burglary.
Charlotte Schmoyer was fifteen, a student at Dieruff High School, and delivered the Morning Call. On June 9, 1993 he took her off her round. A customer noticed her abandoned cart outside a window and rang the newspaper, the newspaper could not find her, and the newspaper called the police. Her body was found in woodland near Mosser Elementary School that day. She had been raped and stabbed twenty-two times. The tread pattern of one of his sneakers matched the bruising on her face.
Eleven days later he broke into a house he had been watching. The woman he had gone there for was asleep beside her boyfriend, so he went upstairs instead, carried her five-year-old daughter down to the ground floor, put her face down in a laundry basket, raped her and choked her. He left her for dead. She regained consciousness and told her mother what had happened.
Jessica Jean Fortney was forty-seven and a grandmother. On July 14, 1993 she was beaten, strangled and suffocated in her own home.
The investigation had the DNA from Schmoyer before it had a suspect. It had also had him in front of it and let him go: some time after that killing he was pulled over for speeding, took the ticket and drove off.
In November 1994 a Lehigh County jury convicted him of all three murders and returned three sentences of death. He was nineteen. For the attack on Sam-Cali and for shooting at Officer Lewis he received forty to eighty years, and for the rape and attempted murder of the five-year-old, fifty-seven more.
Two of the three death sentences have since gone, and the reason is his age. Because he was seventeen when he killed Joan Burghardt, and the Supreme Court has held that mandatory life without parole cannot be imposed on juveniles, he was resentenced for her murder to life and then, in October 2019, to thirty-five years to life; the judge urged him to consider donating his brain to science, calling it the one gift he could give. In December 2012 he waived his appeal rights in the Schmoyer case in exchange for a life sentence.
That leaves Jessica Fortney. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upheld the death sentence for her murder in December 2013, rejecting arguments about his trial counsel and about brain damage, and the Third Circuit affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief on April 4, 2024.
In February 2026 the secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, Laurel Harry, signed a notice of execution setting March 24, 2026. She did so under a state law that hands the decision to the department when the governor has not signed a warrant within a set period. Governor Josh Shapiro stayed it and issued a reprieve, writing that he had already said he would authorize no execution warrant during his tenure and would grant a reprieve in every instance. Pennsylvania has had a moratorium since 2015 and has executed nobody since 1999.
Robinson is fifty-one and held at SCI Phoenix in Skippack Township. He is understood to be the only person under sentence of death in the United States for a series of killings begun as a juvenile, and the case that put him there was made not by the murders but by the woman who survived him and let the police wait in her house.
Denise Sam-Cali's part in it was told in the 1996 television film No One Could Protect Her, with Joanna Kerns playing her.