Robert Yale Shulman worked nights as a mail handler at the post office in Hicksville, on Long Island, and lived in a rented room at the back of a house in the same town. In April 1996 Suffolk County detectives arrested him near that house and drove him to the police station in Yaphank, where he gave four written statements admitting that he had killed three women in his room. A Suffolk County jury convicted him of first-degree murder under a provision of New York's 1995 death penalty law that covers a person who kills three or more people in separate events committed in a similar fashion, and a second jury voted unanimously that he should be executed.
He was one of seven people sentenced to death under that law by April 2005, according to a State Assembly report, and his appeal was one of the last two then waiting in the state's highest court. In October 2005 the New York Court of Appeals upheld his convictions, rejected his argument about how the "similar fashion" element should be read, and vacated the death sentence. The Long Island Press later reported that he had been convicted of killing five women in all between 1991 and 1996, that he was resentenced to life in prison, and that he died in prison in 2006. One of the three women in the Suffolk County case has still not been identified.
The Court of Appeals described his living arrangements because they mattered to the investigation. Shulman rented a room in a house in Hicksville, in Nassau County. His brother lived in the same house and also worked for the Postal Service. The brother was the registered owner of an older blue Cadillac, registered at the Hicksville address, which became central to the case.
Shulman worked the night shift as a mail handler at the Hicksville post office. At work he had a padlocked security booth, a detail that would later give investigators their strongest physical evidence. Women who later spoke to detectives said he called himself "Bob," and several of them were able to describe his room.
Little is known of his age, schooling or family. The Long Island Press, writing in 2011, described him as a loner and a postal worker from Hicksville.
The first of the three to be found was a woman whose name is still not known. She was found on the morning of December 7, 1994, in Medford, Suffolk County, and investigators came to call her Jane Doe Medford. The Suffolk County District Attorney's Cold Case Task Force describes her as a white woman between about 20 and 30 years old, about five feet one inch tall and about 135 pounds, with a tattoo bearing the name "Adrian" on her upper left shoulder. Genetic genealogy work has shown that her ancestry is Western European, with at least 75 percent of it traced to England, Scotland and Wales. To mark National Missing Persons Day, the task force released a clay facial reconstruction of her, an updated composite sketch, and a drawing of how the tattoo probably looked during her life, and asked the public for help in putting a name to her.
Lisa Ann Warner was found dead on April 6, 1995, in Brooklyn.
Kelly Sue Bunting was 28 and lived in Hollis, Queens, according to the Long Island Press. Her friends knew her as "Melani." Two women who knew her told detectives that they last saw her on December 8, 1995, with a man in an older blue Cadillac. She was found dead three days later, on December 11, 1995, in Melville, in western Suffolk County. A tattoo helped establish who she was, and her identification gave detectives their first real lead.
All three women had been beaten. The Court of Appeals noted that the pattern of injuries was similar across the three cases, one of several factors that persuaded it the police had probable cause to arrest him.
Detective Joseph White of the Suffolk County Police Department's Homicide Squad took up the Melville case. On December 13, 1995, acting on an anonymous tip, he went to an address in Hollis, Queens, where three women recognized the victim from the description and told him she was known as Melani. She was later identified as Kelly Sue Bunting.
Two of the women told him about the last time they saw Melani, on December 8, with a man in a blue Cadillac. Canvassing in the area from December 14 to 16 turned up nothing useful.
What did help was what women in the area told him about a white man from Nassau County who drove a blue Cadillac. Their descriptions of the man and his car began to give the investigation a shape.
An item of evidence in the Melville case was of a brand that, White learned, was sold only by Sears. Once he had the name of the registered owner of the blue Cadillac, Shulman's brother, he called the loss prevention office at Sears on January 4, 1996. The Sears employee he spoke to raised a question of her own: did he know that a Robert Shulman lived at the same Hicksville address? It was the first time Robert Shulman's name came up in the case. Sears records showed that he had taken out a Sears credit card in July 1995, although he had never used it.
Detectives then worked to tell the two brothers apart and to test what the women had told them. Between January 14 and February 12, 1996, several women picked Shulman out from surveillance photographs and photo arrays, and some identified the blue Cadillac. One woman could not identify the brother at all, which helped investigators separate the man the women knew from the other man in the house.
On January 16 postal inspectors gave the police the work schedules of both brothers. The records later showed that Robert Shulman had not worked his scheduled shifts on December 7, 1994, the day the first woman was found, or on December 8, 1995, the day Kelly Sue Bunting was last seen.
On January 20 a detective watching the house saw one man drive another to a train station. By matching what he saw to the brothers' work schedules, police worked out which brother was the man the women had described. It was Robert.
On March 21, 1996, after Shulman's shift had ended, police and crime laboratory staff went into his padlocked booth at the post office with the help of postal inspectors. They photographed it, vacuumed it and took tape lifts. Five kinds of trace material from the booth, light blue and orange carpet fibers, cat hairs, foam padding and jute, matched material recovered in the investigation. A laboratory technician described the result as a "strong associative connection."
Police arrested Robert Shulman near his home in Hicksville on April 6, 1996. He was read his Miranda rights and waived them. During the drive to the Suffolk County police station in Yaphank, a detective showed him a photograph of Kelly Sue Bunting. He made several statements that incriminated him while still denying that he was responsible for her death.
At the station he gave four written statements describing the three killings, and he agreed to give samples of hair, blood and saliva. He also wrote on photographs that detectives showed him.
His account changed during the questioning. At first he said that he had blacked out after smoking crack with the women and that he did not know what had happened. When a detective told him that the blackout story was not believable, he said that he had not blacked out but had "just lost control," and that he sometimes felt anger and rage. He said he had thrown away the objects he used each time, right afterward, because he would think "it's not going to happen again."
On April 7 and 8, 1996, police searched his room on the strength of what he had told them. DNA analysis linked evidence found there to each of the three women.
New York restored the death penalty in 1995. A report by three State Assembly committees in April 2005 records that the law was enacted on September 1, 1995, after being signed by Governor Pataki. The statute made certain kinds of intentional murder punishable by death, including the killing of a victim when the defendant had intentionally killed two or more other people within 24 months, in separate criminal transactions "committed in a similar fashion or pursuant to a common scheme or plan." That language, Penal Law 125.27(1)(a)(xi), described in the Assembly Codes Committee's bill memorandum, was aimed at multiple killers.
Suffolk County prosecutors charged Shulman under it, combining the three killings into one count of first-degree murder, and filed notice that they would seek a death sentence.
Four of Shulman's challenges to prospective jurors later reached the Court of Appeals. The defense had asked the trial judge to excuse each of them for cause, and the judge refused.
One was a corrections officer whose written questionnaire had answered a question about life without parole with sarcasm. Another had used hesitant phrases such as "I think I can" when asked whether she could be fair, but answered "Absolutely" when asked about her state of mind. A third had read a newspaper article about the case despite an instruction not to, which the courts later accepted as an honest misunderstanding; he promised to follow the rules from then on. The fourth was a man whose brother-in-law had been a Suffolk County prosecutor, had attended one pretrial meeting about the case, and had resigned before jury selection began. In each case the Court of Appeals found that the trial judge had acted within the law, holding that the jurors' assurances of impartiality were enough and that the brother-in-law was not "counsel for the people" in the sense that would have required the juror to be excused.
While the trial was under way, Newsday ran an article under the headline "Link to 2 More Victims," with a subheadline that read "Prosecutor[:] Blood in Shulman's Home Matches Women." The defense asked the judge to poll the jurors about whether they had seen it. The prosecutor argued that asking would only draw their attention to the article. The trial judge called the headline "somewhat neutral" and declined to question the jury. The Court of Appeals agreed that this was not an abuse of discretion, finding that the headline was not "poisonous," and said it did not need to decide whether to adopt a three-part test that federal courts use for midtrial publicity.
The jury found Shulman guilty of first-degree murder and other offenses. Because prosecutors had filed notice that they would seek death, a separate sentencing proceeding followed, and the jury concluded unanimously that he should be executed.
His appeal went directly to the Court of Appeals. Shulman was represented there by the Legal Aid Society of New York City, with a team that included Andrew C. Fine and Arthur H. Hopkirk. The Suffolk County District Attorney, Thomas J. Spota, answered the appeal through a team of assistant district attorneys from Riverhead. The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, through its Committee on Capital Punishment, filed a brief as amicus curiae. The case was argued on September 6, 2005.
By then the death penalty statute was itself in trouble. On June 24, 2004, in People v. LaValle, the Court of Appeals ruled by a vote of 5 to 4 that the law's "deadlock" instruction, which told jurors what would happen if they were unable to agree on a sentence, violated due process under the State Constitution. It also held that the problem was not curable simply by dropping the instruction, because a jury had to be told what would follow a deadlock. In its April 2005 report, the Assembly's Codes, Judiciary and Correction committees counted seven people who had been sentenced to death under the 1995 law, noted that the death sentences of Darrell Harris, Angel Mateo and James Cahill had been reversed on separate appeals, and recorded that the appeals of two death row inmates, John Taylor and Robert Shulman, were still pending.
Shulman's main argument on his conviction concerned the meaning of the words "committed in a similar fashion." His lawyers said they referred only to the killings themselves, meaning the nature of the injuries and the instruments used or not used. Reading the words that way, they argued, was faithful to the plain language and to the Legislature's aim of keeping the category of death-eligible murders narrow.
The court disagreed. Judge Read wrote the opinion, and Chief Judge Kaye and Judges G. B. Smith, Ciparick, Rosenblatt, Graffeo and R. S. Smith concurred. The opinion held that "committed in a similar fashion" modifies the phrase just before it, "separate criminal transactions," so that the whole of each transaction could be compared, including what the defendant did after a victim's death. The court pointed to its own earlier decision in People v. Mateo, which had refused to give the phrase a fixed definition because similarity depends on context, and which had looked at matters beyond the killing itself, such as the victims, the motives and the locations. "What counts is the similarity of the conduct," the court wrote, whether it came before or after death. The trial judge had told the jury that crimes committed in a similar fashion share a similar modus operandi, meaning the method used in committing them, and that "similar means merely corresponding." The Court of Appeals found that the evidence was enough for the jury to find similarity.
Shulman also argued that the police had arrested him without probable cause. The court looked at the evidence as a whole and found the arrest lawful. It listed the main points: Kelly Sue Bunting was last seen getting into the Cadillac that Shulman used; the three women had a similar pattern of injuries; trace evidence linked them to his booth at the post office; he had missed scheduled work on two key dates; and women from Jamaica Avenue had described his room and his habits. Because probable cause existed without it, the court did not decide whether the trial judge should have held a hearing on the reliability of the dog's reaction to the Cadillac. It considered the remaining challenges to the conviction and found none of them had merit.
On the sentence, the result was decided by the court's earlier rulings. In Matter of Hynes v. Tomei the court had struck down the plea provisions of the 1995 statute, and in later cases, including People v. Harris and the second Mateo appeal, it had held that a death sentence imposed after a trial held while those provisions were in force could not stand. Shulman had gone to trial under exactly those conditions. On October 25, 2005, the court modified the County Court judgment by vacating the sentence of death, sent the case back to County Court for resentencing, and otherwise affirmed it.
The New York Sun reported two days later that the ruling left New York with only one inmate on death row.
During the trial, the Newsday headline about two more victims had pointed to killings outside the capital case. The Long Island Press, in a 2011 article about earlier killers on Long Island, wrote that Shulman had been convicted of killing five women between 1991 and 1996. It reported that he had confessed to the police, that he was resentenced to life in prison after his death sentence was set aside, and that he died in prison in 2006.
Jane Doe Medford remains unidentified. The Suffolk County District Attorney's office, under District Attorney Ray Tierney, set up its first Cold Case Unit to work unsolved homicides with the county police Homicide Squad, using techniques that include genetic genealogy. The office has offered a reward of up to $2,000 for information that identifies unknown victims and accepts anonymous tips. Its appeal for Jane Doe Medford, with the reconstruction of her face and the drawing of the "Adrian" tattoo, describes her as having been killed by Robert Shulman.
Proven by the jury verdict and final: the first-degree murder conviction covering Jane Doe Medford, Lisa Ann Warner and Kelly Sue Bunting, with the other offenses found by the same jury.
Reported but not set out in a court record: convictions for two further killings, which would bring the total to five, and the dates the Long Island Press gives for the series, 1991 to 1996. That paper's 2011 article also said the death sentence had been for a single murder committed after the death penalty was restored; the Court of Appeals opinion shows that the capital count covered all three Suffolk County killings.
Not established: what sentence he received at resentencing in Suffolk County. The Long Island Press reported that he was resentenced to life in prison; the details of that sentence, and the exact date and place of his death in 2006, have not been reported.
December 7, 1994: A woman later known as Jane Doe Medford is found in Medford, Suffolk County; Shulman does not work his scheduled shift that day.
April 6, 1995: Lisa Ann Warner is found in Brooklyn.
July 1995: Shulman opens a Sears credit card that he never uses.
September 1, 1995: New York's death penalty law is enacted.
December 8, 1995: Kelly Sue Bunting, known as Melani, is last seen getting into an older blue Cadillac; Shulman does not work his scheduled shift.
December 11, 1995: Kelly Sue Bunting is found in Melville.
December 13, 1995: After an anonymous tip, Detective Joseph White goes to Hollis, Queens, where three women recognize the victim as Melani.
December 14 to 16, 1995: A motel canvass turns up nothing useful.
January 4, 1996: White calls Sears about an item of evidence, and a Sears employee raises Robert Shulman's name.
January 14 to February 12, 1996: Women pick Shulman and the Cadillac out of photographs and photo arrays.
January 16, 1996: Postal inspectors provide the brothers' work schedules.
January 20, 1996: Surveillance shows which brother lives in the rear room.
March 21, 1996: Police and crime laboratory staff search his padlocked booth at the Hicksville post office.
March 22, 1996: A trained dog reacts to the blue Cadillac.
April 6, 1996: Shulman is arrested near his home in Hicksville and gives four written statements at Yaphank.
April 7 and 8, 1996: Police search his room; DNA later links stains there to all three women.
Trial in Suffolk County: a jury convicts him of first-degree murder, and a sentencing jury unanimously chooses death.
June 24, 2004: In People v. LaValle, the Court of Appeals rules the death penalty law's deadlock instruction unconstitutional.
April 3, 2005: An Assembly report lists his appeal as pending.
September 6, 2005: His appeal is argued.
October 25, 2005: The Court of Appeals affirms his convictions, vacates the death sentence and sends the case back for resentencing.
2006: He dies in prison, according to the Long Island Press.
2011: The Long Island Press reports that he had been convicted of killing five women between 1991 and 1996.