Early in November 2005, Rochester was settling into the cold when Vivian Irizarry, a 54-year-old Hispanic woman, disappeared into an ordinary evening that would turn deadly. She’d been dropped off at an apartment building on Spencer Street, a place where she was known and where she’d visited before, and nothing about that stop would have seemed unusual to anyone watching the front steps.
Days later, a gaunt man named Robert Bruce Spahalski walked into the Monroe County Public Safety Building and insisted he had to speak to homicide—because, he said, he had killed someone. He gave police the address at 202 Spencer Street and told them the victim was Vivian, explaining that she’d been there in the building, out of sight, since the night he attacked her. Officers listening at the counter realized no one had even reported a homicide from that location yet; the horror, he suggested, was still waiting where he left it.
As detectives questioned him, police and firefighters went to Spencer Street and entered the basement. They found Vivian’s body in a back room, nude except for a single sock, with blood on her face and a rope around her neck. Investigators described signs of beating and strangulation, and dragging marks across the floor leading to where she had been left. The basement’s chill had slowed decomposition, reinforcing what Spahalski had told them—that she’d been there for days.
What began as a confession to one killing quickly widened. In interviews that followed, Spahalski admitted involvement in earlier homicides in the Rochester area and nearby Webster, drawing investigators back into cases that had gone cold years before. In court records describing the investigation, he is noted as having come in on his own accord a few days after Vivian’s death, and then confessing not only to her killing but also to the three prior killings as the interviews continued.
The case ultimately went to trial, where a jury convicted Spahalski of five counts of second-degree murder arising from four homicides, including Vivian’s killing in November 2005 at his home in Rochester. He was sentenced to a total term of 100 years in prison, and years later an appellate court upheld the judgment, leaving the conviction and sentence intact.
