On June 27, 1992 a construction worker searching a dumpster for a lost lottery ticket, behind a pizza parlor at 1288 Midland Avenue in Yonkers, found a woman's dismembered remains in black trash bags. One of her legs and both arms had been removed. Nobody could say who she was. She was recorded as Yonkers Jane Doe, and she stayed that way through a capital prosecution, a death sentence, the collapse of that sentence, and the death of the man who killed her.
In the fall of 2021, twenty-nine years later, a Yonkers cold-case detective, John Geiss, had an FBI team put her DNA into genealogy databases. Within three weeks a cousin who had tested to research the family tree turned up as a match. In November Geiss went to Plymouth, Michigan to meet her sister and brothers, who gave DNA samples and knew her from a photograph and from the butterfly tattoo on her back. Her name was Meresa Hammonds. She had been born in Kentucky in April 1961, one of seven children, grew up largely in California, lived in Michigan, and was living in New Jersey, where she and a sister had worked as fashion models, when she disappeared at thirty-one. She had two sons. Geiss found one of them, Jason Di Trapani, a toddler when his mother vanished, who had grown up believing she had not cared enough to look for him. Carl Koppelman, a volunteer forensic genealogist with the DNA Doe Project, announced the identification in December 2021 with the family's permission.
Robert Yale Shulman was born on March 28, 1954, one of four sons of Jules and Mildred Shulman, and grew up in Long Beach and Westbury on Long Island. His father died of Hodgkin lymphoma in 1967, which hit Robert and his brother Steven hardest; Robert sometimes threatened to kill himself. He graduated from W. T. Clarke High School in 1972 without friends or sports, and his eldest brother, Shelly, later described him as shy and withdrawn, and said Robert and Steven both used drugs and had outbursts of rage over small things. Their widowed mother remarried within days of meeting a man through Parents Without Partners, and people who knew the family described a filthy, neglected house.
He left Hofstra University after two years and went to work for the Postal Service in 1974. His mother died of a heart attack two years later, and Steven killed himself the year after that. In the mid-1980s Robert and his younger brother Barry rented two apartments in the same house at 10 Glow Lane in Hicksville, owned by an elderly woman who was hard of hearing, and both worked at the post office on West John Street on different shifts. Neighbors found him withdrawn. He never married, and he spent much of his free time in the red-light district.
Between August 1991 and December 1995 he picked up women, often from a street corner in Hollis, Queens, and brought them back to his apartment, where they smoked crack and had sex. The five who died were Lori Vasquez, twenty-four, of Brooklyn; Meresa Hammonds; a woman still known only as Medford Jane Doe; Lisa Ann Warner, eighteen, of Jamaica, Queens; and Kelly Sue Bunting, twenty-eight, of Hollis, who was known as Melani.
The New York Court of Appeals set out what he did in plain terms. He beat them about the face and head with a heavy blunt object, using a baseball bat on the Medford woman, a dumbbell on Bunting and a hammer on Warner, and he used enough force to split their skulls open. He dismembered them in the bathroom, cut off their hands or their limbs, and put the bodies out in garbage receptacles. The hands and limbs went somewhere else, in different bins in different places, and the court said why: to stop the women being identified.
Vasquez was found in a Yonkers dumpster on August 31, 1991. Warner's remains turned up on April 6, 1995 at a recycling plant in Brooklyn, carried there by a garbage truck from a dumpster in Nassau County. Bunting, last seen on December 8, 1995, was found in Melville wrapped in a sleeping bag, her hands removed. Her many tattoos identified her in March 1996, when the Suffolk County district attorney's office sent photographs of them to the New York police in case she had a record, and she had.
The sleeping bag caught him. Only Sears made that model. A detective canvassing hotels for the murder site heard about a man in a blue Cadillac who cruised the area, and women led police to a house where the car was parked; it was registered to Barry Shulman. Sears said Barry had no credit card, but his brother did. Women identified Robert as the man in the Cadillac, cadaver dogs indicated that remains had been in the car, and a search of his workplace found trace evidence matching the evidence on Bunting's body. He was arrested near his home on April 6, 1996, broke down under questioning and confessed to the three Suffolk County killings, and later to the two earlier ones. His room was spattered with hundreds of bloodstains.
Barry Shulman, questioned after the arrest, admitted that he had known what his brother was doing and had helped him carry remains out of the apartment and get rid of them over the years, though he denied taking part in any killing. He was indicted on April 26, 1996, and in January 2000 he was convicted of helping dispose of the bodies and sentenced to two years. The district attorney, James M. Catterson, had asked for four and two-thirds to fourteen years and said Barry could be paroled within ten months, and the victims' families were outraged.
Robert's lawyers tried to lay the groundwork for an insanity plea. Anthony J. Colleluori argued that his client had been mentally ill since the deaths of his mother and brother in the 1970s, and he was put on suicide watch in the Suffolk County jail. Bail was refused when it emerged that he had more than three hundred thousand dollars in the bank on a postal salary of about thirty-four thousand a year, money he would not explain. A court-ordered evaluation in 1997 found him sane and fit for trial.
The Suffolk County trial began in December 1998 and ran five months. The prosecution, led by Assistant District Attorney Georgia Tschiember, charged first-degree murder on the ground that the three killings there had been carried out in similar fashion, which made it a capital case under the statute New York had restored on September 1, 1995. His lawyers, Paul Gianelli and William Keahon, argued that Barry was the real killer, pointing to cat hair on two of the bodies that matched Barry's cat, and claimed that a detective had posed as a lawyer offering psychiatric help to get the confession signed. On March 5, 1999 he was convicted, and he wept at the verdict. On July 13 he was sentenced to death by lethal injection, with an execution date of August 30 that the appeal postponed.
In Westchester County, on January 4, 2000, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Vasquez and Hammonds, still then unidentified. Both killings came before the death penalty statute took effect, and he was sentenced to twenty-five years to life.
In 2004 the Court of Appeals struck down the deadlock provision of the death penalty statute in another man's case, and no death sentence in New York could stand. His own appeal was decided in October 2005, and the court rejected every challenge to the conviction. He was moved to the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora. In early April 2006 he fell ill and was taken to the Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh and then to Albany Medical Center, where he died of natural causes on April 13, 2006, aged fifty-two.
The Medford woman was found on December 7, 1994 by an employee of the Suffolk County Department of Public Works, between Yaphank and Medford, on the shoulder of Long Island Avenue in one account and in a garbage can in another. He told police he beat her to death with a baseball bat and took off her limbs with an ax and a hacksaw. She was between five feet and five feet one, about 135 pounds, with brown eyes and reddish-brown hair that may have been dyed, and on her left arm she had a tattoo of a red heart with a banner bearing the name Adrian. Nobody has yet been able to put a name to her.