Penn professor guilty of killing

University of Pennsylvania professor Rafael Robb pleaded guilty yesterday to the bludgeoning death of his wife, Ellen, saying that he was sorry but had "just lost it" as they argued in their Upper Merion home on Dec. 22.

In a Montgomery County courtroom strained with tension, Robb, 57, acknowledged for the first time that an argument over Christmas vacation plans disintegrated to the point where he grabbed an exercise bar and "started flailing" at his wife.

Robb told the court he had taken their 12-year-old daughter, Olivia, to school and gone home to talk to his wife about her plan to take Olivia on an out-of-state holiday visit to her relatives. Robb said that he wanted to know when they would return home but that the discussion escalated into an argument.

Finally, he said, "I grabbed the bar and I started flailing it," leaving his wife's skull and face beaten beyond recognition.

"I just lost it," Robb said.

Robb apologized to his wife's family, his family and his daughter.

"Now she doesn't have a mother," he said, his voice breaking.

He entered the guilty plea during a court hearing on what had been scheduled as the first day of his murder trial. But Robb, an economics professor who has been on leave from Penn since his arrest in January, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, a lesser degree of homicide than the first- and third-degree murder charges he had faced.

The case now moves to a new phase: deciding how much time he will spend behind bars.

Though a first-degree conviction would have brought a mandatory life sentence, state sentencing guidelines call for a wide range of possibilities for voluntary manslaughter, depending on the facts of each case - a minimum of 42 months in prison, a standard range of 54 to 72 months, and an aggravated range of 10 to 20 years in prison.

Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. said he would seek a "substantial" term of imprisonment, though he acknowledged it was possible but not likely that Robb could get a much shorter sentence, such as time served awaiting trial and sentencing.

The sentence will be up to Montgomery County Common Pleas Court Judge Paul W. Tressler, a former prosecutor.

A sentencing hearing, expected to be held in the spring, will likely explore in painstaking detail the lives of Rafael and Ellen Robb, who was planning to divorce her husband after years of marital discord.

The discontent could be traced to soon after the couple's wedding in 1990, and friends and family were long aware of the problems. The Robbs eventually retreated to separate bedrooms and retained but one bond, their daughter, born in 1994.

Ellen Robb, who would have turned 50 the day after Christmas, suffered from depression and in recent years had slipped away from friends. The house was so cluttered with purchases and other items that it was hard to get past the front door.

Defense attorney Frank DeSimone said Rafael Robb was "not a criminal" and remained "very, very remorseful" and "very sad" about what happened. He suggested that mitigating factors would surface during the sentencing hearing and cast Robb in a more favorable light. "It was a very difficult case," said DeSimone, a veteran criminal defense lawyer.

A spokesman for Penn said yesterday that the university had been in contact with DeSimone in the aftermath of the guilty plea, and had asked for Robb's immediate resignation.

Robb told his daughter of his involvement in the killing during a phone conversation from prison, DeSimone said. Robb has been held at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility without bail since his arrest.

Both sides agreed that the facts of the case warranted the charge of voluntary manslaughter, which is generally defined as an intentional killing in which the offender had no prior intent to kill, such as a crime committed in the heat of passion.

"The law defines this crime as exactly what happened," defense lawyer Jules Epstein said.

Castor agreed. "I have never seen a burglar beat someone to death and not steal anything," he said. "Our evidence agrees with his side of the story."

For Ellen Robb's family and friends, it was a difficult story to hear.

About a dozen relatives and friends sat solemnly during the proceeding, but many were unable to stifle sobs when the defendant described the bludgeoning, which occurred as Ellen Robb wrapped Christmas gifts in the kitchen of their home.

For days, Robb had been mulling entering the plea or enduring a long trial delay because of a legal issue that was expected to trigger a pretrial appeal.

Castor filed the voluntary manslaughter charge as soon as it became apparent that Robb would admit to the killing. For Castor, the guilty plea resolved a challenging circumstantial case in which there was no physical evidence linking Robb to the killing.

That legal issue focused on whether two mental-health experts should have been permitted to tell the jury that, in their opinion, Ellen Robb was killed in an "enraged blitz" attack by someone who wanted to "depersonalize" her.

Castor contended that the testimony was necessary to help him build a circumstantial case against Robb.

Tressler had been weighing whether to order a hearing during which the two experts would testify, but Castor said he would file an immediate appeal, which likely would have delayed the trial for two or three years as Pennsylvania appeals court judges decided the issue.