Epilogue
With four years passed since the day Robert Bruce Spahalski turned himself in, Rochester did not cease to be a dangerous place. Huge portions of the city, including Edgerton Park, Dutchtown, and much of the city’s west side, remained on the “don’t go there” list. Even more of the sagging houses were boarded up. Even more of the boarded houses were torn down. Prostitution remained a fiercely dangerous profession, but on Lyell and Lake Avenues, the ladies were more apt to die from drugs or disease than at the hands of a john. The Crescent was inhabited by too many people who had no choice but to live there, people who either never had a chance or squandered their last chance in the crackling of a glass pipe.
On November 13, 2008, that other surviving Rochester serial killer, Arthur Shawcross, died. He’d been serving a 250-years-to-life sentence, and life won. Although few grieved, the historic nature of his crimes did render his death noteworthy.
Just weeks before his death, Shawcross was transported from the Sullivan Correctional Facility to the Albany Medical Center for an undisclosed illness.
A grown son of one of his victims said he felt sad at the news, because now Shawcross was facing an eternity of burning in Hell, and he wouldn’t want to wish that fate upon anyone.
Another relative who would never forget her lost loved one was Kelly Gangemi, sister of Vicki Jobson. Vicki was the party girl turned prostitute whose body had been found stabbed multiple times, in December 1992, not far from the New York Central railroad tracks, a block north of Lyell Avenue.
Gangemi lived in the town of Greece, a suburb of Rochester that butted up against the city’s northwestern-most section. Seventeen years had passed since her sister’s murder, and still she and the rest of her family had no closure.
For years after Vicki’s murder, she assumed that her sister was one of the victims of John White, the suspected serial killer who had never been arrested. Then, when White died, she learned that Vicki had not been on the list of murders that police believed White had committed.
Arthur Shawcross was already in prison by the time Vicki disappeared, so it couldn’t have been him. Of the known serial killers working in that area at that time, that left Robert Bruce Spahalski, who lived in Vicki’s building.
Kelly Gangemi’s life since her sister’s death had not been easy. She had a daughter and grandchildren to look after, a niece in prison, an aging father and friend who needed care, and yet she couldn’t stop thinking about Vicki.
“I’m going crazy. I’m falling apart,” she had said upon the sixteenth anniversary of the discovery of Vicki’s body.
After all that time, Kelly still commemorated her sister’s birthday. Each year on Veterans Day, Vicki’s birthday, Kelly drove to the corner of Rutter and Haloid Streets to see “the spot,” the place where her sister’s body had been found.
“I do it because it keeps my energy fresh. I do it because it makes me angry,” Kelly said. After visiting the spot, she sometimes visited Vicki’s grave site. She could feel her sister’s spirit at both locations. It was tough on Kelly, tough especially in October, the month of Vicki’s death. Nobody was even sure what the anniversary of her death was.
Kelly was determined to have Vicki’s killer caught, even in 2009 after all those years had passed. She sought answers, and tried to always focus her energy on finding the creep or creeps who did it.
Every once in a while, there was a Democrat and Chronicle headline—a murderer had been caught. Kelly’s heart always leapt. Every time. She still had faith.
“I’m not vindictive. I know that catching her killer won’t bring Vicki back,” Kelly said. “I have this big cloud hanging over my head.”
But she couldn’t surrender, either. She couldn’t back up, which was weird if she stopped to think about it. There wasn’t that much Kelly could do. She wasn’t an investigator. All she could do was pester the hell out of the cop assigned to Vicki’s case.
She didn’t want to interfere. She just wanted to make sure they were all on their toes, the actual investigators. Vicki’s murder was now a cold case, and cold cases didn’t get priority. She understood that, but she also wanted to make sure Vicki wasn’t forgotten altogether by the RPD.
She thought about being an activist. Maybe she would hold a protest, maybe a march. Sometimes she thought about planting a tree in Vicki’s memory, or starting a charity that gave coats to the prostitutes on the street in winter.
“Just something,” she said.
She had a dream. One day it would be Vicki whose murder was solved on the front page of the newspaper, and it would be Kelly on TV talking about how great the investigators were.
Since it happened, Kelly kept a scrapbook that was filled with memories of Vicki’s life and death. There are family photos dating back to the 1960s, Vicki’s school picture, and the many letters and cards of condolence she received after the murder.
Kelly patiently pasted the Xeroxes of the newspaper stories on Vicki in the scrapbook. Kelly left the last page of the scrapbook blank. That space was reserved for the solution to the mystery.
There were items in there that were unexpected. Kelly refused to be queasy. There were photos of “the spot.” There was a photo of the medical examiner’s staff loading Vicki’s remains into their vehicle.
But there were also things in the scrapbook that couldn’t have been more sentimental, exactly the sort of items that you’d expect, items that broke Kelly’s heart, like a copy of a Mother’s Day card that Jobson’s daughter, Keisha Washington, made as a second grader.
“You can never fill the hole from Vicki’s dying. But you can close it a little bit,” Kelly said.
Besides the sadness she felt when thinking about the sister she lost, Kelly was disturbed by Vicki’s murder in other ways as well. Like so many before her, she couldn’t fathom the workings of a guilt-free mind.
“I’ll always wonder, was he a veteran? Is he somebody she knew? Did he see me on the news? Will he read this book? Can someone carry this secret for so long? I can’t imagine how someone can walk around knowing that he killed someone’s sister. There’s not a minute I don’t think about it. I will not give up.”
One might think that a murder case as old as Vicki Jobson’s would be ice cold, but multiple sources said this was not true. RPD investigator Randy Benjamin said, “We are following a few leads, and this is a case where I really think we are on the right track.”
Retired sergeant Mark Mariano, who had been on the scene after Moraine Armstrong was killed, had also been the first officer on the scene when Vicki’s body was found. Years later, as a homicide detective, he had been present when Robert came into police headquarters to give himself up, and had been among those to discover Vivian Irizarry’s body.
During his last years on the force, and even after retirement, Mariano fought to keep Vicki’s case active. He felt the fact that she and Spahalski had once lived in the same building was just a coincidence.
Normally, in a civilized city, the chances of a woman living in the same building with a serial killer, but being killed by someone else, would be astronomical. But the Edgerton neighborhood during that time was anything but normal. Murder was so rampant that coincidences like Vicki and Robert Spahalski’s proximity were absolutely believable.
Because of Mariano’s efforts, there was a forensic excavation, and many people were reinterviewed. Regarding Vicki’s murder, Mariano agreed with Benjamin that there were positive leads and the investigation was not stalled.
“I don’t believe Spahalski did it,” Mariano said flat out in 2009. “I’m certain that he didn’t, and I know who the suspects are.” Note the plural.
Mariano did not believe that Robert Spahalski was organized enough to kill someone in one place and dump the body in another. With the exception of Vivian Irizarry, who had been dragged from the upstairs to the downstairs of the same building, Spahalski’s known murders all involved a crime scene in which the body lay precisely where it had been killed. With Vicki, though, she had been killed in one place and then—months later—had been moved to the place where her remains were found.
“I don’t think Spahalski woke up in the morning and said, ‘I think I’m going to kill someone today,’” Mariano said. “And in that sense, he is not the prototypical serial killer. He was a guy who repeatedly snapped. He would be in a situation and something would go wrong, something that triggered an uncontrollable urge to kill in his brain, and that was when he committed his murders. He didn’t have the type of mind for the kill site to be different from the dump site.”
Was it possible that Spahalski had two methods of operation, one when he was a pedestrian and one when he had a car? He’d been a car thief in Elmira. He drove a pickup truck and a station wagon in Rochester. He’d had a driver’s license until 1991. He stole Adrian Berger’s and Chuck Grande’s cars—so sometimes he had a vehicle, even if it wasn’t his.
“Spahalski is not sophisticated. I don’t think he thought ahead,” Mariano said. “He stole the car in Webster because he’d just killed the guy who’d driven him out there. The car fulfilled a simple and immediate need. He had to get back to Rochester.”
What was Mariano’s theory?
“I worked hands-on, on Vicki’s case, for many, many months. I think her murder was a prostitution deal gone bad,” Mariano said—the Moraine Armstrong story all over again. “She was a feisty little girl. They were doing a lot of cocaine. She felt like she should get paid after the sex. The johns said, ‘We been giving you a lot of cocaine. We ain’t paying you shit.’ She got pissed-off. There was a physical fight. It turned very ugly and she lost. These two dummies then bury her. For some reason, someone is suspicious of the burial site, maybe a family member, so they get her out of there and dump her along the railroad tracks. That’s how I see it.” Yes, he did have definite suspects in mind.
During a 2009 interview, Kelly said that, sadly, she had more time than ever to pester the detectives working on her sister’s case. She had been taking care of a man named Walt Lake, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He died the day after Christmas 2008, and Kelly was between jobs. She suddenly found herself with a lot of time on her hands—being forty-five but feeling twenty-five—and not sure what she was going to do.
“I’m going to be a pain in the ass to the homicide investigators,” she promised.
Kelly had her own entry into the “small world” department. When Robert murdered Vivian Irizarry on Spencer Street, Kelly Gangemi was only a few hundred yards away, working as a waitress at Roncone’s on Lyell Avenue. “We had a dishwasher named Lovey back then, and at the end of the day, he used to give the leftover buns to a guy who lived down the street, and that guy turned out to be Spahalski.”
Kelly knew a lot of the “girls in the area” from trying to find out who had killed Vicki. She knew how hard it was on them, especially during Rochester’s harsh winters, so she gave them “clothes and stuff.”
Kelly was very sympathetic to their plight. She admittedly had been on “both sides of the fence.” She had once been on drugs, but against all odds, she had managed to kick her habit and get her life back together. She knew how hard it was.
On the day that Robert turned himself in, and the body of Vivian Irizarry was found on Spencer Street, someone came running into Roncone’s and said, “Hey, did you hear they found a girl?”
“I went running down there,” Kelly said. “I see the homicide investigators and I said, ‘Who’d they find? Who is it?’ Right away I thought that this was the work of Vicki’s killer.
“The investigators tell me that they have a pretty good idea who killed Vicki, and that it wasn’t John White. My mother always thought it was John White. Turns out, at the time Vicki’s body was dumped, John White was under surveillance.”
Interestingly, John White lived only three streets away from Kelly’s mom in Gates.
“I was freakin’ obsessed with that guy, because back then, I thought he killed my sister. I used to drive by his house off of Long Pond Road and he’d be outside and I’d look at him in his eyes.”
Kelly Gangemi was grateful for all the hard work the police had already put in over the years. She especially appreciated Mariano’s efforts. She feared that time was running short for any of it to matter. Her mother had passed away. Her sister and her father were sick. The answers had to come before it was too late.
Ethel Dix, the mother of murder victim Damita Gibson, hoped that this book might stir up some interest in her daughter’s case.
She said, “The homicide investigators did not investigate Robert Bruce Spahalski thoroughly enough to see if he did murder my child. Her murder is still unsolved, and I hope that you can help me get any answers in her death. It has been eighteen years, and my daughter, just as well as me and her children that were left behind, would like to have this solved so that she can rest.”
How were Damita’s three children? Joseph, the baby, was long since recovered from the gunshot he’d suffered years before. Tamaija was doing well, attending college at Geneseo.
William, the oldest, was a father himself by this time, making Ethel a great-grandmother. He had gone over to his girlfriend’s house and had gotten into some trouble there. He’d been caught by police carrying a gun and was probably going to end up doing some time. Ethel figured it might be a blessing in disguise. He’d had the gun on him, but he hadn’t committed a crime with it. He’d been caught and was off the streets. Maybe he would learn his lesson before he had a chance to hurt anyone, or get hurt himself.
“I still have a lot to thank God for,” Ethel said. “The boy has had his problems, his challenges. As a child, he was on Ritalin. He was filled with anger, losing his mother the way he did at such a young age.”
Ethel found her participation in the creation of this book cathartic. Her husband, Mason, is a bus driver, and when she rode with him along the #9 line, which went down Jay Street, and passed the spot where Damita’s body was found, she always had to look the other way. Sometimes she didn’t ride along at all, because she didn’t want to go through that area. But while this book was being written, Ethel agreed to accompany photographer Jerry Warren to the spot. While there, she felt her fear dissipate, a pressure lift from her chest, and the area was purified of its stigma.
Even though almost twenty years had passed since the young woman whose friends called her D.J. had lost her life, her mother still thought about her all the time. Sometimes the memories came rushing back in strange and powerful ways. Just recently Ethel was going through some stuff and found a note Damita had written, just a shopping list, really, but it brought with it a flood of memories and feelings.
Sadly, on October 5, 2009, Ethel Dix passed away without ever solving the mystery of her daughter’s murder.
Rochester police investigator William “Billy” Barnes died of cancer on October 20, 2008. Barnes had worked the Damita Gibson case, as well as the cases of Moraine Armstrong and Adrian Berger. He had been the recipient of Richard Marchese’s letter, written following Charles Grande’s murder, telling law enforcement not to question Robert Bruce Spahalski about any murders before his criminal impersonation trial.
Joseph Damelio, Robert Spahalski’s defense attorney, is in private practice with his office in downtown Rochester. His practice specializes in personal-injury cases.
Vivian Irizarry’s employer had been the Center for Disability Rights. CDR’s motto was “Helping People Help Themselves.” Their emblem is Lady Liberty’s torch thrust out of a triangle, around which was written, Civil Rights. Integration. Independence. Their mission was to create an environment that was free of physical barriers for people with all sorts of disabilities, a world in which no one who was wheelchair-bound would be prevented from participating in an activity because a facility lacked a ramp or an elevator. They provided a variety of services, but the most common was what was called “Independent Living Services,” helping everyone from those with mental handicaps to blind and deaf people. They ran their recreation for the handicapped program out of facilities in Edgerton Park, the actual park. Between 2005 and 2008, the organization lost several members to murder.
As this was written, the most recent was Shawndale Walters, killed during the summer of 2008 as he was taking care of his disabled brother. This was something he did every day and every night, when he was shot on St. Paul Street, just outside his brother’s house.
When Pat Patterson was an investigator for the Chemung County Sheriff’s Office in 1971, and he found himself in the cellar of Your Saladmaster Kitchen in Elmira Heights, he had no idea that he was merely at the dawn of what would become a long and distinguished career in law enforcement.
He worked for eleven years with the sheriff’s office, and for four more years as an investigator in the Chemung County District Attorney’s Office. Going to school the whole time, he earned an M.S. degree in education at Elmira College. In 1975, while a county cop, he attended the FBI’s National Academy for a law enforcement–training program. He was the elected sheriff of Chemung County for two years—and then the FBI recruited him.
He became an FBI special agent in 1983 and worked for the Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore divisions. He was in and out of headquarters in Washington, DC, a few times. For three years after the Berlin Wall came down, he was in international operations, training in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. His specialties were drugs and organized crime.
After a couple of hairy gigs in South America, Patterson returned stateside. He went to Los Angeles as an assistant special agent in charge of the violent crime program. He wasn’t there for long when he was again called out of the country to investigate the USS Cole bombing in Yemen.
“I was there for several months and I got out alive,” Patterson recalled. “I used up all my nine lives on that one.”
While he worked in Southern California, the most disturbing crime he investigated involved the murder of coeds in a small California town. The young women attended Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo. One was already missing when Patterson first arrived in Southern California. She was never found. Then, soon after he arrived, two more coeds disappeared in quick succession, about a month apart. The key clue was a Magic Eight Ball key ring that could be turned upside down to answer a question about one’s future. The victim had it in her purse when last seen, and it ended up with other souvenirs in the killer’s home, along with a starter pistol. The guy’s name was Rex Krebs, and it was his parole officer who saw the Magic Eight Ball and made the connection.
Patterson recalled Krebs’s creepiness: “This guy would go out and dig a grave, six feet deep, out in the woods or someplace—it was a rural area. He would put hard wire down in there so animals couldn’t dig it up. After he had all of these preparations made, he would go out and start stalking someone. One victim, Aundria Crawford, was a young coed who he stalked for a long time. One day, when she was home alone in her apartment, he knocked on the door. When she answered, he grabbed her and dragged her into his car. He kept her for three or four days, sexually assaulting her. Then he put her in the grave,” Patterson recalled. “Like the Spahalskis, this Krebs guy was an absolute predator.”
In 2001, Patterson was transferred back from Los Angeles to Virginia headquarters. “That was fun,” he said. “I was there about seventeen months.” During that time, he used slides of the Ronald Ripley crime scene in Elmira Heights as part of his lecture.
He was transferred from Virginia to San Antonio, Texas, where he was promoted to special agent in charge of that division, and that was the position he held when he retired.
In 2009, Elmira victim Ronald Ripley’s sons David and Ronjay were rapidly approaching retirement after more than twenty years with the New York State Corrections Department.
Of course, neither David nor Ronjay had ever been allowed to work in the same facility that held one of the Spahalski twins. The Ripleys reported the circumstances regarding the twins when they first began to work for the Department of Corrections (DOC). The Ripleys would have been transferred rather than have a conflict of interest like that.
David told this author that he wants the world to think more about crime victims. By that, he means not just those who are murdered, but the families of those poor unfortunate souls who have to live with the reality of their loved ones’ murders for the rest of their lives.
As for the murderers of the world, he thought they were coddled. Based on his decades inside prisons, he said, “These guys get treated pretty well. They are taken care of. You’d have to be in there to know. They have more rights behind the walls than we do on the outside.”
Ronald Ripley’s daughter, Priscilla, has moved to another part of the country, but the brothers still gather around the piano and sing whenever they get together, just as they did when they were little and their father was teaching them how to harmonize.
Bruce Crew was a graduate of Colgate University and Albany Law. He served as the Chemung County DA from 1973 to 1983, and during that time, he put both Spahalski twins behind bars.
Since 1982, he’d been a judge.
During the late autumn of 2008, the man who had prosecuted Robert Bruce Spahalski successfully, First ADA Kenneth C. Hyland, retired at the age of fifty-seven after serving for thirty years in the Monroe County DA’s Office. For much of those three decades, he’d been second in command.
Though the Spahalski prosecution was one of his most gratifying, it wasn’t his most disturbing. That dubious honor went to a Rochester man who shot his wife and his three-year-old son before turning the gun on himself.
“I couldn’t believe a man could do something like that, kill a child, just to get back at his wife,” Hyland said.
In addition to Spahalski, Hyland also successfully prosecuted Robert Hartle, who killed his girlfriend and an elderly couple in 2006 and 2007; Jerold and Keya Ponder, who killed Jerold’s pregnant girlfriend in 2002; and Jose J. Santiago, who killed two children and attempted to kill their mothers and another relative in 1999.
Though retired from the DA’s office, he wasn’t retiring from the law, not even from courtroom action—but he was switching sides. He joined the Pittsford, New York, law firm of Sercu & Sercu, which practiced criminal defense law.
Cedric Alexander—Dr. Cedric Alexander—who was the acting Rochester police chief at the time of Robert Spahalski’s arrest, moved on to become the deputy director of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services in Albany. He was the recipient of the 2008 Black Heritage Pioneer award.
He left the police force soon after Robert Spahalski’s conviction and became the federal security director for Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
An interview with Stephen when he was still in Attica showed a man struggling with reality. He said that there was stuff in prison that still reminded him of Ronald Ripley, the man he killed in Elmira more than three decades before. For example, all the EXIT signs in his prison were maroon. That was because Ripley was wearing a maroon vest on the night he died. It was all tied together on the cosmic plane.
Of course, crime scene photos revealed that Ripley wasn’t wearing a vest at all at the time of his death, but rather a blue-and-black sweater, but that was neither here nor there. The cosmic plane, obviously, was color-blind.
Stephen—who had taken to wearing homemade eye makeup, fingernail polish, and feminine attire in prison—was asked if an unwanted sexual advance had really been his motive for murdering Ronald Ripley.
Stephen became coy: “I don’t talk on it. If I kill someone, I kill them for a reason. That’s all I know.”
He claimed to have been in communication with Ripley, having found a link to the spirit world—an open line to the dead—on a prison computer.
There was a rueful Stephen: “If it hadn’t been for the murder, I would have been all set,” Stephen said.
Referring to Ronald Ripley, he offered this more frightening addendum: “He’s deceased, but I did business afterward with him through a computer. His papers are in order with me. He don’t owe me nothing.
“He’s still going to try to get me, Ronald Ripley, but I already did business with him. I’m real pissed at that man sometimes. He never saw me hit him from behind. He died. I made sure he died.
“But he never saw me kill him.”
According to Robert Bruce Spahalski, his mother, Anita, who would be in her eighties by now, was still alive and living somewhere in the Elmira area.
He recalled the profound effect his mother had on him, a positive effect that continued to serve him even as he sat in his prison cell. “She was a socially shy woman with a strong spiritual belief, and she taught me much of God’s consciousness while drinking our traditional cup of coffee together in the morning. Because of her, I’m very spiritual and have God in my prison cell for company every day. My mother could not understand my criminal behavior, and she only coped with it because it’s a mother’s duty.”
His father, Bernard, was long gone. After leaving New York State, he lived in Tampa, Florida, for years. According to Robert’s youngest brother, Ben, their dad died in Tennessee, riddled with cancer, paying the big price for smoking two packs of Camels every day since Robert could remember.
Robert has stuck by his statement that he was never angry at his father. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t hurt. It wasn’t anger.... It was more like disappointment.
“I was always disappointed with him because he never found the time to give us social guidance. He was always too involved running his dairy business. But I still love him and miss him.”
As for his own health, Robert was in his fourteenth year of being HIV positive, a condition that was closely monitored and well-maintained by the doctors in the Great Meadow prison.
The HIV wasn’t a problem in prison, but stress was.
“It has taken its toll on me,” Robert said. “I’ve lost weight. I have headaches, aches and pains.”
The stress started when he thought about the reason he was incarcerated, the flaw in his brain that made him lose control of himself and kill people.
“Clarity of mind helps,” he said, and described being interviewed for this book, taking “a trip down memory lane,” as being very helpful in his never-ending pursuit of relaxation.
Sometimes he paced in his cell like a wildcat in a cage. But he got to watch cable TV, listen to the rock stations on the radio—and when he paced, he paced with style.
“I do a moving yoga,” Robert said. Seeing himself as a spiritual man, he combined martial arts with “diaphragmatic breathing.”
He was spiritual, but not religious. He believed in God, who only sometimes grabbed him by the ear and pointed him in the right direction.
Now, in prison, his demons had been released. “I feel peace and forgiveness inside myself. We’ll leave it at that,” he said.
If they made a movie out of Killer Twins, who would he want to play him? “Charles Bronson,” Robert joked. “Too bad he’s dead. Anybody who can play the character of a paranoid psychotic and hard-core crack addict gets my vote.”
Now that he’d had plenty of time to ponder the matter, did he now think he was a serial killer?
“Maybe I was,” he answered. “I think I was the victim of circumstances, and people close to me got killed in my insanity.”
Maybe, in his old age, Robert was embracing the “serial/psycho killer” tag. It brought him attention. There was something his victims had in common, something he could call his signature.
“They all died naked,” he said, perhaps finding romance in the notion. And, of course, Robert was wired to the gills and in need of more drugs for each murder, too, but that wasn’t nearly as romantic.
What was the greatest irony of his criminal career? The bizarre fact that he, a lifelong druggie, had never been arrested for a drug crime. The list of crimes he had been arrested for was long—so long it went all the way up his arm—but not one of those counts had anything to do with drugs.
“I have no criminal history for drug usage. I knew how to manipulate police and drug dealers to my advantage,” he boasted.
It saddened Robert that he and his twin had been separate for most of their lives. His strongest and fondest memories of Stephen all involved being a kid. Steve was a private guy who even kept things from Robert at times. He loved Sue Cunningham, gymnastics, and good weed. By the time Stephen got in serious trouble, he and Robert had already drifted apart, cultivating their own friendships and hanging with different crowds. So, pretty early on, Robert developed his sense of individuality. And, of course, after age eighteen, he only saw his twin when they were in the same prison.
Some positive things had happened to Robert in prison since his murder conviction. He once met David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. That was cool. That made two serial killers he’d seen: Berkowitz and Shawcross. Members of the serial killer elite.
Plus, Robert had been living without a full set of teeth since the day he was jumped coming out of a dope house in Rochester and had his face kicked in by three gang members. Even though those thugs kicked eight teeth out of his head, they still never found his stash of drugs. He’d been wearing two pairs of pants, and the crack was hidden in a secret pocket behind the knee of the inside pants. He was out eight teeth, but he still had his ten bags of crack. One had to look at the positives. Police and robbers never looked behind the knee. Robert went to the dentist the next day, but it wasn’t until April 2009 in prison that he had his final fitting for a new pair of choppers. So things were looking up.
“Only ninety-six more years to go,” Robert Bruce Spa-halsi quipped.
Hollow humor from a doomed man—a man who had no dreams, only nightmares of rotting away in his cell.
As scheduled, as the law demanded, Stephen was released from Attica on July 22, 2009. He had maxed out his sentence and there was no holding him anymore. No one came to pick him up. According to an Elmira reporter, Stephen was given forty dollars and dropped off at a bus station.
Soon thereafter a dispatch from the New York State Intelligence Center warned state police to be on the lookout for Stephen, who was presumed to be dangerous and possibly armed. The reason for the dispatch was Stephen’s behavior on his way out of Attica.
According to the dispach, Stephen said he was going to kill his mother when he got out. Slaughter her. Bludgeon her with a hammer. Then, the dispatch claimed, he was going to go after two retired members of law enforcement. He called them a couple of “Chemung County lieutenants.”
These men, though unnamed in the dispatch, were presumed to be Pat Patterson and Eddie Wilkins, the guys who put him away. Wilkins was already deceased and Patterson was far away.
Contacted regarding Stephen’s parting words at Attica, Patterson—speaking from his home in the suburbs of San Antonio—said he was hopeful that Stephen would come and try to kill him.
“He might come to Texas,” Patterson said. “But he’s never going to leave.”
A week or so later, an old friend saw Stephen walking the streets of Elmira. Stephen said he was aware of “the rumors” about him being a dangerous man. But that was all it was: a rumor. He had no intention of hurting anyone ever again, he said.