The Devil's Dozen (22 page)

John installed an alarm system, but once again the intruder managed to break in. During the night of July 18, someone set off the alarm and left in haste by the back door before the Calis saw him. However, they found several things missing in the morning, including some luggage and a handgun left on a table.

The D.A. believed that the rapist would certainly revisit the home again to silence the witness and he wondered if he could work this to his advantage. It would mean the Calis would have to remain in the home, vulnerable, to lure the man back, but he assured them that they would have police protection every night. They bravely agreed to the plan. Denise wanted relief from the unrelenting nightmares she’d been having since her attack. This man, she believed, had victimized her and would continue to exert power over her until she did something to take it back. She figured that if the intruder managed to break in and get past the police guard, she’d be ready to blast him with her own gun. John would be there, too.

But before this plan was set in motion, another woman was killed.

The Allentown serial killer had spotted a large-boned, overweight white woman, and he’d followed her until he saw where she lived. Jessica Jean Fortney was forty-seven, and she lived with her grown daughter, son-in-law, and their seven-year-old child. On July 14, these three were asleep on the second floor, with loud fans cooling the place, when the man entered and attacked Fortney in the living room, breaking her nose with a weapon. Then he raped and strangled her, leaving her blood-covered body on the sofa beneath a blanket. But this time, there was a witness. Fortney’s grandchild had seen the assault from her bedroom. Her description matched what Denise Sam-Cali had said about her attacker.

D.A. Steinberg realized there was a dangerous serial sex killer at large in Allentown who was striking quickly, and often. These crimes had all been committed in the same general area, and except for the newspaper girl, all the victims were attacked inside their homes, after the offender had entered through a window.

The police could only hope the killer would try yet again to silence the one woman who had survived. Their fear was that he would begin to roam a larger area, as his latest crime, over a mile away from the others, suggested. Allentown was close to the urban communities of Bethlehem and Easton, as well as a cluster of smaller towns within a fifteen-minute driving distance. If the killer had a car, as it seemed he did, and was feeling the heat, he might just go farther out. But on July 31, he made a major miscalculation.

Officer Brian Lewis, a patrolman with just over three years’ experience, was assigned to the Sam-Cali home, a single-story ranch house, while another officer, Ed Bachert, went to the house where the five-year-old girl had been accosted. The assignment was to last two weeks.

They generally arrived around eleven-thirty in the evening and remained until six in the morning. Lewis’s routine was to go around and secure all the doors, but leave two casement windows in the front room open, because the intruder had used this entry before. No one knew if this plan would work, but the officers continued to watch, night after night. Then, on the twelfth night, around 1:20 a.m., Lewis heard a distinctive noise: someone was prying at the patio door.

“I was right inside the front door,” he related, “against the wall. I knew all the doors were secure, and the patio door even had a piece of wood inserted to prevent it from opening. The rear door had a dead bolt as well. I was positioned where I could see the living room and the casement windows. When I heard a big yank on the patio door, it was probably the best adrenaline rush of my life. I knew this was it!” An outside light showed him a shadowy figure moving around, so unlike the incident a few nights before at the other house, this person was sticking around.

“My instructions were to allow him to come into the home and I would then notify others with the police radio.” To accomplish this, Lewis would pull a pin out of the radio, which sent a signal to the communication center that he was in need of immediate assistance.

“I then heard the back doorknob being turned, and a few minutes later, there was another tug on the patio door. I got my gun and flashlight out, and I went to kneel behind the couch.” He’d never before shot at a person, so he was understandably tense. “The next thing I saw was the doorknob turning on the front door, and I’m thinking, did I lock that? I was only about two feet away from it. But it didn’t open. By that time, my adrenaline had subsided and I was thinking, we’ve waited this long, don’t screw it up.”

He saw the screen on one casement window being prodded, and he expected a knife to come through to cut it, “but it just kept getting pushed and finally it pushed in. I saw a hand with a big rubber glove like the kind that janitors use, and it lowered that screen onto the couch below.”

At this point, he had not yet pulled the pin on his radio and he did not dare try to talk into it, lest he alert the intruder and scare him off.

“The next thing I see is a face coming through the window. Because the area was lit by a table lamp, I saw a profile. He had a good-size nose. Then the face turned and looked in my direction and then looked away. The next thing I saw was an arm and leg come in. I ducked behind the couch to completely hide and pulled my pin. I heard someone inside the living room, so I stood up and identified myself, and said, ‘Freeze!’ ”

For a moment, the two of them were face-to-face in the small living room. The intruder had a gun on his waistband and he reached for it, so Lewis fired a shot from his Smith & Wesson six-shot revolver. “My flashlight fell to the floor and he dove into the kitchen area, where it was dark. I moved to the doorway and saw a muzzle flash coming back at me. I realized we were in a battle, so I stepped to the left of the doorway, which was a wall, to get some cover. I immediately stepped back to the doorway and fired a shot at where I believed he was, on the floor. By the time I’d fired, he had moved to the back door. I could hear him but I couldn’t see, so I fired my next four shots at where I believed he was.”

Now Lewis was out of ammo, so he had to reload. He pulled back to where he had cover, but thought,
I can’t reload here. He’s right there, he’s got a gun
. He recalled an incident in Allentown where a sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed while reloading, so he retreated toward the back bedroom. He knew the couple was in there, so he yelled out, “Don’t shoot, it’s me!”

Frightened by all the commotion, John and Denise were standing on either side of the bed, holding guns. Lewis got on the radio to tell other officers what was happening. He heard the intruder banging on the dead-bolted back door and kitchen walls, trying desperately to get out. The house was literally shaking. Lewis instructed the couple to stay out of the way as he reloaded and prepared to face the gunman again.

But suddenly the place went quiet. It felt too still.

Lewis edged cautiously toward the kitchen, uncertain what to expect and keeping his gun ready. As he drew closer, he anticipated that the guy might spring out at him or fire from some dark area. He neared the door to the kitchen, tense, his heart pounding, but when he still heard nothing, he wondered if the intruder had found a way out. Then he saw it: several broken windows on the wooden door. “They were just ripped out of the door.”

The man had managed to force his way out and slip away. Lewis went outside, hoping the vice officers had caught him, but there had been an unfortunate delay. When his backup had heard the shots and received the emergency signal, they’d been several blocks away. Thus the intruder had eluded them.

Nevertheless, an examination of the door frame indicated that he’d left blood behind. Lewis thought that perhaps he’d winged the guy and they might have a blood trail to follow. Even better, the intruder might seek medical attention, and blood samples at the hospital would match those in the Calis’ house. He also noticed that one of his shots had hit a can of baked beans, exploding its contents into the room. Another officer held up the can and said to Lewis, “You’re never gonna live this one down.” However, it would prove to be a fortuitous hit.

The entire episode had lasted about twenty minutes. Calls were made to the consortium of Lehigh Valley hospitals to be on the lookout for anyone coming in with a bad cut from glass or a bullet wound. This was the closest the police had come to nailing this offender and they were excited but cautious. There was no certainty in such situations.

Several hours went by without a word. It seemed that the killer had eluded them, but around 3:30 a.m., police learned that a young man had shown up at the Lehigh Valley Hospital’s ER to get treated. His arm and leg were bleeding badly. He seemed to realize that he’d walked into a trap and quickly headed for an exit without talking to anyone, but he was stopped outside and detained.

Lewis arrived, but the light had been poor, so he couldn’t be sure it was the same man he’d seen in the home. The shoes looked the same, but that was no way to identify someone. However, inside the cruiser car, under different lighting, he was sure. This was the man who had shot at him hours earlier. His name, it turned out, was Harvey Miguel “Miggy” Robinson and he lived on the east side of town with his mother, Barbara Brown, only a few houses from where Ed Bachert had watched during the night.

Lewis learned that Robinson, only eighteen, had told his girlfriend he’d been hurt at a party and it was she who’d insisted he get medical treatment. So he’d gone to the hospital. Since the Sam-Cali residence was on the west side and the hospital across town, he might have believed no one would link him to the break-in.

Robinson was booked and arraigned on multiple charges, including breaking and entering, burglary, aggravated assault, and attempted homicide. He was held in lieu of $1 million bail. On September 3, Denise Sam-Cali testified at his hearing that she could identify Robinson as the man who attacked her and she fully described her ordeal. He sat throughout the hearing with a glare on his face. Other evidence against him included Officer Lewis’s identification, a bite mark that Denise claimed to have made during her assault, black gloves found in his bedroom at his mother’s home, and the Colt .380 handgun stolen from the Calis, along with casings that matched those from two bullets fired on July 31 in their home.

The police worked hard to find evidence for the trials. They searched two cars, a light blue Ford Tempo GL belonging to Robinson’s mother, which was similar to the car seen in the neighborhood when Charlotte Schmoyer was abducted, and Robinson’s gray Dodge Laser SE. His blood was in both, indicating that he had driven them at different times on the night of the shoot-out, after he was cut. The cars were processed for fingerprints and other evidence. Searching his house, they located some baked beans from the can that Officer Lewis had shot open. They also found clothing, which Robinson had attempted to wash, that matched what Lewis had seen the intruder wearing.

For his arraignment, Robinson wore a bulletproof vest. Police had learned that between the Burghardt and Schmoyer murders, eight months apart, Robinson had been incarcerated for burglary but had no history of mental illness. Investigators believed that he had either known his victims or had stalked them in some manner before raping or killing them. He may have burglarized Burghardt’s apartment a few days before he killed her.

In December 1993, just after Robinson turned nineteen, the papers announced that DNA tests from his blood samples linked him via semen to the three rape/murders and the two rapes. In addition, his blood and hair were found on Schmoyer, and both the little girl he had raped and Denise Sam-Cali identified him as their attacker.

During a preliminary hearing on January 6, 1994, the prosecutors laid out the case against Robinson for multiple rapes and murders, among other charges. Eighteen witnesses were called, including Denise Sam-Cali once again, although the trial for her rape and attempted murder would be a separate proceeding.

D.A. Steinberg led the prosecution while Robinson’s family had hired David Nicholls, and Nicholls immediately questioned the validity of the DNA evidence. It was a common ploy for defense attorneys in those days, because while DNA analysis had been confirmed as a viable science, such attorneys hoped to win back some ground by questioning laboratory procedures and poor handling of evidence. Nicholls suggested possible problems with the technicians, exposure of the samples, questionable internal procedures, and the reliability of the test itself.

Supervisory Special Agent Harold Deadman, with the FBI lab, put the specimens through testing, along with specimens from other men in the area with a history of sex crimes, but only Robinson was a match for the samples retrieved from the victims. The state-police lab confirmed this with its own tests.

The first case to be decided involved Denise Sam-Cali. D.A. Steinberg told her that Robinson would plead guilty in return for a reduced sentence and no trial. She initially declined this offer, but, on April 13, accepted the terms. Semen samples removed from the victim shortly after she was attacked were matched via DNA analysis to Robinson, and she identified him as her attacker. In addition, he had a gun in his possession that he’d stolen from her house, and Officer Lewis identified him as the man with whom he’d had a shoot-out there.

Robinson said nothing during the hearing and his attorney called no one to speak on his behalf, although Robinson’s mother and half sister were present. Nicholls made it clear that the defendant had long been a troubled young man who’d had a difficult life. He offered no motive, but he did set forth the young man’s good qualities: a high IQ that allowed him to obtain his high school equivalency diploma when he was sixteen (and in juvenile detention) and a good relationship with a loving mother.

Steinberg told reporters afterward, “He is everything that is evil in society, all rolled up in one person.” But Nicholls asked for leniency and suggested that Robinson could be rehabilitated. Steinberg countered this with Robinson’s lengthy juvenile record and the threats he had made against other prisoners at the facility where he was currently detained. In fact, since the first grade (which he repeated) Robinson had been resistant to rules and aggressive toward others, and he’d committed his first juvenile offense, a theft, at the age of nine. Each time he was released from juvenile detention, he committed more antisocial acts and refused to take advantage of prosocial opportunities. Given this history and set of behavior patterns, his chances for rehabilitation seemed slim to nonexistent.