Robert Zarinsky was convicted of one murder. In 1975 a Monmouth County jury found him guilty of the first degree murder of Rosemary Calandriello, a 17-year-old from Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, who walked out of her home on an errand on August 25, 1969, and was never seen again. Her body has never been recovered. The case rested on schoolmates who saw her riding in his car, on evidence from that car, and on things he said to men held with him in jail. His appeals produced a ruling that still governs New Jersey law: in 1977 the state Supreme Court held that there is no statute of limitations for murder in New Jersey.
For more than 30 years after that conviction, prosecutors in several counties looked at him again. In 2001 a jury in Elizabeth acquitted him of the 1958 shooting of a Rahway police officer, Charles Bernoskie. Late in his life he was indicted for the 1968 killing of Jane Durrua, a 13-year-old from Keansburg, and pleaded not guilty; he died in prison in November 2008 before that case could be tried. In 2016 the New Jersey State Police and the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office said that DNA evidence linked him to the 1965 killing of Mary Agnes Klinsky, an 18-year-old high school senior. He was never charged in that case. News reports also named him as a suspect in the deaths of other teenage girls in central New Jersey in the late 1960s and 1970s. None of those cases was ever charged against him.
Zarinsky lived in Linden, an industrial town in Union County. In 1969, according to the New Jersey courts, he and his wife lived there with his father, and the car at the center of the Calandriello case was registered to his father. WABC-TV later described him as a former grocer.
Little is known for certain about his early years. A 2002 CBS News report said that in the 1960s he had been a suspect in arsons, vandalism and robberies, and that by the 1970s investigators had come to suspect him in a series of killings of teenage girls. At his 2001 trial in the Bernoskie case, CBS reported, the jury did not hear about his history of armed robbery, his murder conviction, or an earlier occasion on which he had lied under oath at a parole hearing.
His family later became central to the case against him. CBS reported that his mother, whom it described as the head of the family, kept the family silent for decades about what his sister said she knew, and that when his mother died in 1995 she left almost all of an estate of roughly a quarter of a million dollars to him, though he was in prison. That inheritance, and a later dispute over money missing from it, set the stage for the events that reopened the 1958 case.
Rosemary Calandriello was 17 and lived in Atlantic Highlands, a small borough on the Monmouth County shore. At about 6 p.m. on August 25, 1969, according to the New Jersey Supreme Court, she left home to buy milk and ice pops, carrying $2. She told her family, "I'll be right back." A neighbor saw her walking toward town. She has not been seen or heard from since.
The neighbor told police she had seen a stocky man slouched in an old Ford near a bowling alley. Four of Rosemary's schoolmates testified that they saw her riding with a stocky man in a white Ford Galaxie with a black convertible top. All four later identified him as Zarinsky, and they did so again in court.
Prosecutors also presented evidence of what had happened around that bowling alley and in nearby Leonardo, part of Middletown Township, in the weeks before and the days after. The Appellate Division recorded that two 12-year-old girls and two 14-year-old girls testified that a man matching his description had tried to get them into his car. Two days after Rosemary disappeared, one of the younger girls wrote down the license plate of the car. That plate was registered to Zarinsky's father.
On August 27, 1969, two days after the disappearance, a complaint was filed against a "John Doe" for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. That night Zarinsky was arrested at the Linden home and the car was impounded, the Supreme Court said. On August 28 four boys identified the car, and later that day the four girls picked him out of a lineup. By then, the Appellate Division noted, he had shaved off his goatee and sideburns.
The complaint was amended to a charge of abduction. A search warrant for the car was carried out on August 29. According to the Appellate Division, investigators recovered blood scrapings from the right rear bumper and the rim of a taillight, mud, straw and grass from the lower front of the car, alcohol in the glove compartment, shell casings under the back seat, hairclips and other items, and tools from the trunk. They also found that the door and window handles on the passenger side had been removed and hidden under the seat. The court also noted that federal authorities later matched a hair fiber found on one of the tools to a hair sample from Linda Balabanow, the victim of a separate 1969 homicide. He was never charged in that case.
The abduction charge did not hold. In June 1970 it was dismissed because it had not been presented to a grand jury without unnecessary delay. The investigation continued.
On February 20, 1975, about five and a half years after Rosemary disappeared, a Monmouth County grand jury indicted Zarinsky for her murder. The trial began on April 7, 1975. The State had no body and no confession to police. The Appellate Division said the case rested largely on circumstantial evidence, and that the State had needed time to assemble proof that she was dead.
The proof came in several parts. The schoolmates placed her in his car. The girls who had been approached placed him and the car in the neighborhood. The search of the car produced the physical evidence. And three men who had been held with him in jail testified about things he had said.
One testified that Zarinsky had told him, "They'll never find that stinking broad." Two others testified that during an angry outburst he admitted getting rid of Rosemary's body. One of them told the jury that Zarinsky had referred to details of the case and had explained the missing door handles as a way to keep girls from getting out of the car.
Zarinsky did not testify at his 1975 trial. His wife, his mother, his father, and aunts and uncles testified that he had been at home on August 25, 1969. The State offered evidence contradicting his father and mother. His wife gave innocent explanations for several items: she said the handles had been removed because a window jammed, that the hairclips and other items in the car were hers, and that the blood came from her brother, who had cut his hand repairing the taillight.
The jury convicted him of first degree murder. He received the sentence the law then required, life imprisonment, and the trial court denied his motion for a new trial.
On appeal Zarinsky raised a long list of objections. The Appellate Division heard argument on March 16, 1976, and decided the case on July 20, 1976, in an opinion by Judge Botter for a panel that also included Judges Kolovsky and Bischoff.
His main argument was that the prosecution came too late. New Jersey law set a five-year limit for most crimes but exempted offenses "punishable with death." Because the state's death penalty could no longer be enforced after a 1972 decision, he argued, murder was no longer punishable with death and the five-year limit applied. The Appellate Division rejected the argument. It also rejected his claim that the five-and-a-half-year gap between his arrest and the murder indictment denied him a speedy trial, finding the delay reasonably explained and the prejudice to him not substantial. The death of his first lawyer and the destruction of the car did not change that result, the court said.
The court upheld the use of his statements to the men in jail, finding enough independent evidence to corroborate them. "The failure to produce the victim's body does not preclude a finding that she is dead," it wrote. It held the testimony of the four younger girls admissible to show identity, plan and his presence in the area, and to rule out the possibility that Rosemary had run away, taken her own life or died by accident. Any error in holding the lineup without his lawyer present was harmless, given the girls' positive identifications in court. It found the boys' identifications rested on their own memory, upheld the admission of the items from the car, and found no manifest denial of justice in the verdict.
The New Jersey Supreme Court agreed to hear only one question: whether the statute of limitations barred the prosecution. It heard argument on September 19, 1977, and ruled on November 17, 1977, in an opinion by Justice Pashman, with six justices voting to affirm. "We hold that there is no statute of limitations for murder in New Jersey," the court wrote. It traced the exemption of murder back to the state's first limitations statute in 1796, said the Legislature had always exempted murder, and added that the court had "never recognized any fundamental right to avoid criminal prosecution due solely to passage of time." The conviction stood.
Zarinsky served the rest of his life in New Jersey prisons. For years he did not admit the killing. WABC-TV later reported that he eventually admitted his guilt during an unsuccessful bid for parole, claiming that her death had been an accident involving his car. That claim is his own account; no court tested it, and Rosemary Calandriello's body has never been found.
In 2002 CBS News reported that he would not give an interview unless he was paid.
Charles Bernoskie was a police officer in Rahway, a city in Union County a few miles from Linden. On the Thanksgiving weekend of 1958 he went out on patrol in a heavy rainstorm. His wife told CBS News decades later that he came back home briefly for his rubber boots and told her, "I'll be home shortly." While on patrol he came upon a break-in at a car dealership a few minutes from his home and was shot and killed. The couple had five children, with a sixth on the way.
The storm washed away most of the evidence, CBS reported. The gun was never recovered. One fingerprint, found on a can of antifreeze at the scene, could not be matched to anyone. For years his widow called the police to ask whether there was anything new, and was told there was not. She never remarried. She put herself through nursing school and raised six children on her own, and she lived to see 16 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
About 40 years after the shooting, CBS reported, a tip led police to Zarinsky's cousin, then 63 and living in Pennsylvania. He had never been arrested or fingerprinted, and his print matched the one from the scene. The tip came from Zarinsky's sister.
The family history behind it was told to CBS by his sister. She said that on the night of the shooting her brother and their cousin came home wounded, and that their mother treated them at home instead of taking them to a hospital. She said her brother told the family they had been robbing the dealership and that he had shot a police officer. The family kept silent for four decades, she said, on their mother's orders, and she had been afraid of her mother and her brother. She called him "the devil on earth."
The money from their mother's estate came into the story too. CBS reported that when the sister and her husband, in poor health and in financial trouble, asked Zarinsky for help, he refused, saying he would need the money when he was released. He later found $112,000 missing and blamed them. Her husband pleaded guilty to embezzlement.
His cousin gave police his own account. He told them that Zarinsky had pressured him into going to the dealership that rainy night to steal antifreeze, which he needed. When an officer rattled the doors, he said, they panicked and hid; the officer found him and told him he could get up, and when Zarinsky told him to run, both of them were shot as they fled. He said the two later met up and each said he had been hit.
Zarinsky was tried for the murder of Charles Bernoskie in May 2001 in Elizabeth, the Union County seat. The officer's widow attended every day, surrounded by her children. This time Zarinsky testified. He said he had not killed the officer, and he accused his sister of lying when she said he had been shot by police. He offered an alibi involving a girlfriend who had died, and he described his cousin as an experienced burglar whose partner had also died.
His lawyer attacked the credibility of both main witnesses. The cousin had been promised a lighter sentence for testifying. The sister had been promised nothing, CBS reported, but she wanted to avoid prosecution over her brother's money. After eight hours of deliberation, the jury found Zarinsky not guilty. Some jurors told the CBS program 60 Minutes II that they believed he was guilty but did not find the evidence sufficient.
The acquittal is final.
The officer's widow then sued Zarinsky for wrongful death. A civil jury found him liable and awarded $10.8 million, according to WABC-TV, but an appeals court vacated the award in 2006. The dispute had involved money from a mutual fund of Zarinsky's that had been paid to her. She had to return $154,143. Donations allowed her to repay it, WABC reported, though Zarinsky then argued that the repayment did not include enough interest.
The police union stood by the family. In November 2024 the New Jersey PBA unveiled a monument to Officer Bernoskie outside its building in Woodbridge. His son told News 12 New Jersey that "in her hour of need, the PBA stepped up and they were there for us."
Jane Durrua was 13, an eighth-grader from Keansburg in Monmouth County. She was killed on November 4, 1968, while walking home from school, according to WABC-TV. Her killing went unsolved for decades.
The case against Zarinsky was not the first charge in her death. In 2004 a man, J.B., was charged, according to WABC-TV, but those charges were dropped after a laboratory mix-up raised the possibility that DNA evidence had been contaminated.
Prosecutors then turned to Zarinsky. WABC-TV reported that in January of the year he was charged, prosecutors sought DNA evidence to tie him to the killing. The Monmouth County prosecutor, Luis Valentin, announced that Zarinsky, then 67 and described as a former grocer, had been charged in her death. A grand jury indicted him, and at a court appearance in March he pleaded not guilty. He was awaiting trial when he died.
Zarinsky died in the hospice unit at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey, according to WABC-TV, which reported that he had suffered major respiratory problems; officials did not give a precise cause of death. The Associated Press reported in 2016 that he died in prison in November 2008, when he was about to stand trial in the Durrua case. WABC-TV reported his age as 68 and noted that he died on the 50th anniversary of the killing of Charles Bernoskie. He was still serving the life sentence for the murder of Rosemary Calandriello; WABC-TV, in its report on the Durrua charge, described it as a 98-year sentence.
The last development came more than seven years after his death. Mary Agnes Klinsky was 18, a senior at Raritan High School who lived in the West Keansburg section of Hazlet. She was found dead in Holmdel on September 16, 1965, PhillyVoice reported. Police identified her by her high school ring. According to the reports of the 2016 announcement, an autopsy found that she had died of blunt force injuries.
Over the decades, investigators questioned several suspects and witnesses and cleared them, and the case went cold because the technology to match the evidence did not exist, PhillyVoice reported. Detectives kept the evidence and later had it retested with newer methods.
On February 17, 2016, the New Jersey State Police and the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office announced that a DNA profile developed from the evidence by the State Police Office of Forensic Science matched Zarinsky. Prosecutors said the DNA evidence excluded everyone but him, according to the Associated Press, and the State Police said other evidence established a motive and placed him near the scene at the time. "Our detectives never quit," the State Police said.
The acting Monmouth County prosecutor, Christopher Gramiccioni, said that had Zarinsky been alive, he would have been prosecuted for her killing. He said the work had given her family closure: "After more than half a century, they know who killed their sister." Because Zarinsky died before the announcement, he was never charged with her death, and the link rests on the investigators' findings rather than on any court verdict.
Reports over the years named Zarinsky as a suspect in further killings of teenage girls. WABC-TV said that for years authorities considered him a prime suspect in unsolved killings of the 1960s and 1970s in Middlesex, Monmouth and Union counties. PhillyVoice reported in 2016 that he had been a suspect in the deaths of Linda Balabanow, Ann Logan and Joanne Delardo. The Appellate Division recorded the federal hair comparison connected to Linda Balabanow. He was never charged in any of these cases, and the suspicion was never tested in court.
Rosemary Calandriello's death. No body has been found. The jury, the Appellate Division and the Supreme Court accepted that her death was proved by circumstantial evidence. His later account to a parole panel, as reported by WABC-TV, that her death was an accident involving his car, was never tested in court.
The Bernoskie killing. A jury acquitted him in 2001. A civil jury later found him liable, but that award was vacated on appeal in 2006. The account given by his sister and his cousin was rejected by the criminal jury, and some jurors said they found the evidence insufficient rather than believing him innocent.
Jane Durrua. He was indicted and pleaded not guilty. An earlier suspect, J.B., had been charged in 2004 and the charges were dropped. Neither man was tried.
Mary Agnes Klinsky. The DNA match and supporting evidence were announced by the State Police and the prosecutor's office in 2016, after his death. The attribution is theirs; no court has ruled on it.
His sentence. The courts record a mandatory life sentence in 1975; WABC-TV later described his sentence as 98 years.
Other deaths. Press reports named him as a suspect in several more killings of teenage girls; no charge was ever brought.
Zarinsky's appeal gave New Jersey a lasting rule of law. In State v. Zarinsky, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that murder can be prosecuted no matter how much time has passed. The same principle allowed the state to try him in 2001 for the 1958 killing of Charles Bernoskie, and later to indict him for a killing from 1968. The 1976 Appellate Division ruling also stands for the proposition that a murder can be proved in New Jersey without the victim's body.
1958, Thanksgiving weekend: Rahway police officer Charles Bernoskie is shot and killed after coming upon a break-in at a car dealership.
September 16, 1965: Mary Agnes Klinsky, 18, is found dead in Holmdel.
November 4, 1968: Jane Durrua, 13, of Keansburg, is killed while walking home from school.
August 25, 1969: Rosemary Calandriello, 17, leaves her Atlantic Highlands home on an errand and is never seen again.
August 27, 1969: Zarinsky is arrested in Linden on a juvenile delinquency complaint, later amended to abduction.
August 28, 1969: Four girls pick him out of a lineup.
August 29, 1969: His father's car is searched under a warrant.
June 1970: The abduction charge is dismissed for delay in presenting it to a grand jury.
February 20, 1975: A Monmouth County grand jury indicts him for the murder of Rosemary Calandriello.
April 7, 1975: His trial begins. He is convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
July 20, 1976: The Appellate Division affirms the conviction.
November 17, 1977: The New Jersey Supreme Court affirms, holding that there is no statute of limitations for murder in New Jersey.
1995: His mother dies, leaving almost all of her estate to him.
May 2001: He is tried in Elizabeth for the murder of Charles Bernoskie and acquitted.
2004: Another man, J.B., is charged in the Durrua case; the charges are later dropped.
2006: An appeals court vacates a civil jury's award against him in favor of Officer Bernoskie's widow.
Before his death (exact date not reported): He is indicted for the murder of Jane Durrua and, at a March court appearance, pleads not guilty.
November 2008: He dies in South Woods State Prison, Bridgeton, before the Durrua trial.
February 17, 2016: The State Police and the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office announce that DNA evidence links him to the killing of Mary Agnes Klinsky.
November 2024: The New Jersey PBA unveils a monument to Officer Bernoskie in Woodbridge.