Robert W. Schulze, a 58-year-old White man, was killed on April 12, 1982, in Manhattan when an ordinary trip to a parking garage turned into the kind of violence that feels scripted—except it was real, sudden, and final. That evening, he and fellow CBS employees headed to the rooftop lot at Pier 92 along the Hudson River, expecting nothing more than the quiet routine of getting to their cars and going home.
Up on the roof, the scene in front of them didn’t look like an accident or a street argument. A man in a ski mask was dragging a woman’s limp body toward a van. The three men moved in, trying to stop what looked like an abduction in progress. Instead of running, the masked gunman pivoted and shot each of them in the head at close range, then fled; one coworker who had lagged behind saw enough to know he had to escape and drove off to save himself. By the next morning, the woman’s body—Margaret Barbera—was found elsewhere in Manhattan, leaving investigators with four deaths tied to a single burst of calculated gunfire.
At first, the killings looked like the work of someone protected by the kind of power that makes witnesses disappear. Detectives publicly weighed organized-crime possibilities, and the case drew immediate pressure because Barbera wasn’t just any victim—she was connected to a federal investigation involving alleged fraud around the Candor Diamond Corporation. As investigators pulled on that thread, the rooftop murders began to look less like a random tragedy and more like collateral damage: the bystanders had walked in at the worst possible moment, seeing something the killer could not allow anyone to report.
The suspect who emerged was Donald Nash, who had also used the name Donald J. Bowers. Investigators linked the crimes through forensics and circumstance—.22-caliber evidence, shell casings, and traces that suggested planning rather than panic, including the killer’s escape in a van that later became central to tracking him down. With the FBI drawn in because of the federal-witness angle, Nash was ultimately arrested after the murders while driving the getaway van, and the investigation laid out a murder-for-hire narrative: Nash had been paid to eliminate witnesses, and the three CBS employees were slain because they happened to interrupt the operation.
In court, the story hardened from suspicion into verdicts. Prosecutors presented a dense, evidence-heavy case tying Nash to the murders of Barbera and the three CBS employees, along with a conspiracy count connected to the earlier disappearance of another potential witness, Jenny Soo Chin. On May 24, 1983, Nash was convicted of four counts of second-degree murder and conspiracy and sentenced to 100 years in prison. The man accused of ordering the murders, Irwin Margolies, was also punished severely for his role, with later proceedings resulting in a long prison sentence tied to commissioning the killings.
