Robert Bruce Spahalski killed four people in Rochester, New York over fifteen years and was caught only because he walked into a police station and said so. On November 8, 2005, aged fifty-one, he arrived at the Rochester Police Department and confessed to killing an acquaintance, Vivian Irizarry, a few days earlier. In custody he kept talking, and admitted three more killings that had been unresolved for years.
He was born in 1955, one of identical twins, and he and his brother Stephen were gifted athletes as boys. Both became convicted killers. Stephen killed first, beating a shop owner named Ronald Ripley to death with a hammer in 1971 at the age of sixteen; Robert was a suspect in that killing until his brother confessed. Stephen was imprisoned for manslaughter, not murder. The brothers later served time in the same prison, and Robert once tried to escape by hiding in a compartment he had built beneath an army truck in the prison workshop.
Robert was out of prison in 1989 after a burglary sentence at Attica. He was addicted to crack, worked as a male sex worker, and killed for the first time the following year. Moraine Armstrong, twenty-four, was found strangled with electrical cords in her Rochester apartment on December 31, 1990; Spahalski stayed around the scene and spoke to investigating officers, describing himself as a friend of the dead woman. Adrian Berger, thirty-five, his own girlfriend, was strangled in July 1991. Charles Grande, forty, a client who he said refused to pay him, was beaten to death with a hammer in October 1991. Spahalski drove off in Grande's car, gave the dead man's name to police at a traffic stop, was charged with criminal impersonation, and was acquitted of even that. Vivian Irizarry, fifty-four, was killed in November 2005 during what he described as a crack hallucination in which he saw her as a demon.
He was arraigned early on November 9, 2005 on a charge of murdering Charles Grande, and the other charges followed as detectives looked for evidence to back the confessions. In January 2006 he pleaded not guilty to all of them, having dropped a planned insanity defense. The four murders were tried together in Monroe County over two weeks. The prosecutor, Ken Hyland, called about forty witnesses and put in more than two hundred exhibits; the defense attorney, Joe Damelio, attacked the reliability of the thirteen-hour interrogation. On November 13, 2006 the jury took less than three hours to convict him of the intentional second-degree murders of Irizarry, Armstrong and Berger and of two counts of second-degree murder for Grande, one of them for the robbery that went with the killing.
At sentencing on December 13, 2006 (one account gives December 15), Hyland asked for the maximum of twenty-five years to life on each count, served consecutively, and got it: one hundred years. Some of the families had waited fifteen years. Police suspected him in other deaths, but prosecutors said the evidence was lacking. Stephen, told of his brother's confession, said he had thought he was the only murderer in the family, and that Robert would never see home again. In the years after the trial Robert served his sentence at Great Meadows Correctional Facility, where he kept up a long correspondence with the author Michael Benson; no release or death has been reported.