Harvey Miguel Robinson

Victims

3 convictions - first-degree murder of Joan Burghardt in 1992 and of Charlotte Schmoyer and Jessica Jean Fortney in 1993, plus attempted murder and burglary; two women survived his attacks

Years active

1992 - 1993

Location

Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA

Method

Stabbing with knife

Status

Arrested on December 6, 1993, his nineteenth birthday, after returning to the home of a woman who had survived an earlier attack and had helped police set a trap. Convicted of three counts of first-degree murder together with attempted murder, rape and burglary counts carrying close to two hundred years, and given three death sentences in 1994. TWO OF THE THREE HAVE SINCE BEEN SET ASIDE. The Burghardt death sentence was overturned on appeal and he was resentenced to life without parole in 2001, then resentenced again in October 2019 to thirty-five years to life, because he was seventeen when he killed her and the United States Supreme Court has held mandatory life sentences for juveniles unconstitutional. In the Schmoyer case he waived his appeal rights in exchange for a life sentence. Only the death sentence for the murder of Jessica Jean Fortney remains; the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upheld it in December 2013, rejecting claims of ineffective trial counsel and of brain damage, and the United States Court of Appeals for 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 signed a notice of execution setting March 24, 2026; Governor Josh Shapiro stayed it and issued a reprieve, having said he will authorise no execution warrant during his tenure. Pennsylvania has operated a moratorium since 2015 and has carried out no execution since 1999. He is held at SCI Phoenix and is understood to be the only person under sentence of death in the United States for a series of killings committed as a juvenile.

Robinson was born in 1974 and lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was seventeen when he killed Joan Burghardt, twenty-nine, in August 1992, beating and stabbing her in her flat. In June 1993 he killed Charlotte Schmoyer, fifteen, a newspaper delivery girl, abducting her on her round. In July 1993 he killed Jessica Fortney, forty-seven, at her home. He also raped a five-year-old girl and attacked a woman named Denise Sam-Cali twice.

Sam-Cali survived his first attack, and the police set a watch on her house expecting him to return. He did. He was shot and wounded by an officer there on July 31, 1993 and arrested.

He was convicted and sentenced to death on November 10, 1994. He was nineteen at sentencing.

He remains on Pennsylvania's death row. Pennsylvania has executed no one since 1999 and has had a governor's moratorium since 2015, and his sentences have been through repeated appellate review; a resentencing was ordered in one case.

He is one of the youngest people to have been convicted of a series of this kind in the United States, and the fact that a surviving victim's house was the trap that caught him is the part of the case Allentown remembers.