Lisa Ann Warner was a White 18-year-old woman from Jamaica, Queens, whose violent end surfaced in Brooklyn on April 6, 1995, when workers at a recycling plant stopped a conveyor belt and realized a dismembered body had been carried in with the refuse. Her head and torso had been stuffed into a black plastic bag, her face badly battered, and her legs were missing; one arm had been cut away at the shoulder, and the other severed above the wrist, where investigators noted a crude tattoo that
looked like two small crosses.
The way her remains arrived told its own grim story. Investigators concluded that what was found in Brooklyn hadn’t begun there—that her remains had first been thrown into a dumpster on property in Nassau County, then moved along by the ordinary machinery of sanitation until they reached the recycling plant’s belt. In that journey, the crime was briefly hidden in plain sight, disguised as trash until the moment it almost vanished again into a compactor.
For months, the case stood in the shadowy overlap between anonymity and recognition, until it became clear the same hand was shaping multiple scenes with the same brutal grammar. In the murders later grouped with hers, prosecutors and the court described a repeating method: women were brought to the room where the killer lived, beaten again and again about the face and head with a heavy blunt object—specifically, in Warner’s case, a hammer—so violently that skulls split, and then limbs were hacked away and the bodies discarded into garbage receptacles. The cutting away of hands or limbs was presented as part of a calculated effort to frustrate identification and delay justice.
The suspect who ultimately emerged was Robert Yale Shulman, a postal worker living in Hicksville on Long Island, and the path to him came through a separate investigation that began with street-level descriptions and hardened into probable cause. Detectives working the later killings learned of a white man cruising for sex workers in a blue Cadillac and taking them not to motels, but to a residence in Nassau County; multiple witnesses gave consistent accounts, and surveillance and records checks tied the car and address to Shulman. The case tightened further with trace and forensic links and, in court, the record reflects that blood evidence relating to multiple victims—including Warner—was part of what jurors heard during the proceedings.
Shulman was arrested near his home on April 6, 1996. After waiving his Miranda rights, he made incriminating statements during transport and later gave written confessions in which he described the circumstances of the killings, including Warner’s. Searches tied to the confessions uncovered a room marked by what investigators described as extensive signs of violence—evidence consistent with an indoor beating and dismemberment followed by attempts to erase it, leaving behind a forensic map on walls, ceilings, and possessions.
In the courtroom, Warner’s death became one pillar of a larger narrative of “similar fashion” murders. The New York Court of Appeals opinion recounts that a jury convicted Shulman of multiple offenses, including first-degree murder for intentionally causing the deaths of three women in separate but similarly executed crimes, and that the prosecution initially sought the death penalty, leading to a separate sentencing phase where a death sentence was imposed before later legal developments removed it from the case. Other public summaries report that, on March 5, 1999, he was found guilty in Suffolk County of the murders that included Warner’s, and that he was sentenced to death on July 13, 1999; after New York’s death-penalty framework was ultimately struck down, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
The investigation also widened to include what happened after the killings—who helped, who stayed silent, who moved evidence when the killer wanted the world to look away. Public accounts state that Shulman’s brother, Barry, admitted he had helped remove and dispose of remains and was later indicted; those same accounts say he was ultimately convicted of aiding and abetting and sentenced to prison. In that way, Warner’s story—beginning with a terrible discovery on a Brooklyn conveyor belt—did not end with the identification of a single culprit, but with the exposure of a small circle around him that, for a time, helped the violence disappear into the everyday flow of garbage and routine.
