Robert Spahalski

Victims

4 convictions, all second-degree murder. Notably he had been tried for the Grande killing in 1991 and ACQUITTED, and was convicted of it only in 2006 after confessing to it himself

Years active

1990 / 1991 / 2005

Location

Rochester, New York, USA

Method

Ligature strangulation / Hitting with a hammer

Status

Walked into the Rochester Public Safety Building on November 8, 2005 and confessed to killing Vivian Irizarry, then admitted three further murders during a long interrogation. Pleaded not guilty to all charges in January 2006, having abandoned an intended insanity defence, and was tried on all four murders together over two weeks in Monroe County. The jury deliberated less than three hours and convicted him on all counts on November 13, 2006: intentional second-degree murder of Irizarry, two counts of second-degree murder for the beating of Charles Grande, one of them for the associated felony robbery, and intentional second-degree murder of both Moraine Armstrong and Adrian Berger. Sentenced on December 13, 2006 to the maximum of twenty-five years to life on each count, imposed consecutively for a total of 100 years. He remains suspected in other deaths for which prosecutors have said the evidence is lacking.

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 sentenced to 100 years in prison on December 13, 2006. Some of the families had waited fifteen years. Police suspected there were more victims; nothing further has been established.