Closing in on a killer

The day after District Attorney Bruce L. Castor fingered Rafael Robb as a suspect in his wife's murder, Robb had a return visit from Tony Corelli, the alleged ex-con glass helper, who came back to replace the glass on the back door.

Robb appeared glad to see him and said he had wondered if Tony would be returning. Corelli - the undercover name of Det. Tony Spagnoletti - replied that he too had been looking forward to seeing Robb again.

While the glazier readied his tools in the rear laundry room, Robb pulled Tony aside, telling him, "I found things missing and I reported them to my lawyer." Among the missing items were his wife's purse and its contents.

"That's a good thing," Tony said as Robb led him into his study where he asked Tony questions about himself. From his years as an undercover narcotics detective, he not only had a name but all of the identification to prove it and a life story to go with it. There was a lot for them to talk about. "You can Google me and find me," Tony told Robb.

Tony got the conversation back to the burglary. "This looks bad for you," Tony said. "If you didn't report anything stolen, there was no other motive than to kill her. If there wasn't anything stolen in this house, it was a robbery that went bad. There's no such thing as a robbery and nobody takes anything."

"Listen very carefully here," Tony told him. "I read that your arrest is imminent," he added, referring to stories in every media that day describing Robb as the suspect. The D.A. was coming for him.

"I can make bail," Robb responded. Robb didn't know that bail wasn't an option in a murder case.

"You're not going to make bail, not with Castor, you're not. This guy is not going to let you make bail. What you need to do, this has to happen again in the neighborhood."

"You mean, kill somebody?"

"No, a house entry, a house robbery, burglary," Tony continued. "It doesn't have to be on the same street but in a several-block area to make it look like this happened before."

"I don't know the first thing about that," Robb told him.

"You shouldn't be involved in it. Coming from where I am, I know people. This is what you have to do."

Robb looked at Tony and smiled.

"We should sit down and have a drink away from here. You're a neat guy," Robb told him. "I'd like to talk to you more."

In both of his encounters with Tony, Robb said he worried about his 12-year-old daughter, Olivia, and what was going to happen to her. He never mentioned his wife.

Tony knew Robb was an expert in game theory - the art of strategy, of assessing what an adversary would do next. Had Robb been playing mind games with him?

Robb was Spagnoletti's final case, the last undercover job of his 34-year career. He would be retiring in seven more days. He would have loved to have gone out with a murder confession to his credit. He begged Castor to let him go back in and talk to Robb. He thought for sure he could get him to tell him what happened in that house on Dec. 22.

Castor had worked with undercover guys long enough to know that they loved to keep the ruse going.

It was time to move on, Castor told him. Castor didn't want to risk that Robb would flee or get himself involved in other crimes.

Although Robb had turned in his American passport, he was also an Israeli citizen and could hold that country's passport.

Besides, what Castor really wanted from the undercover officers was their assessment. They were experts at reading people. Was Robb their guy?

"No doubt," they told him. "You have the right guy."

That day, as the lead detectives on the case - Montgomery County Det. Drew Marino and Upper Merion Det. David Gershanick - were back at Angelo's for a quick lunch between interviews, Marino gave his partner a heads-up: "I know how he works. He isn't going to let this go on much longer."

He was talking about Castor, the tough D.A. who prided himself on solving murder cases. Robb's arrest would happen any day.

The Philadelphia area reporters also knew the case was heating up and took any opportunity to get comments from Robb. The latest report aired on Fox News, where Rick Leventhal point-blank asked Robb while he was walking his dog near his home whether he had killed his wife. Robb responded, "No, I did not. I did not kill her."

When the detectives from both Upper Merion and the county gathered in the county detectives roll-call room with Castor on Jan. 5, the group - all 30 of them - knew this could be their final meeting.

Deputy Chief of Detectives Sam Gallen, with Marino and Gershanick, was at center stage reporting on what the group had come up with, especially over the last few days, to nail Robb's motive. He'd definitely feared losing his money and his daughter in the divorce. They painted a portrait of Robb as a cold, uncaring husband who had been mentally abusing his wife.

When it came to the physical evidence, the detectives explained what they had suspected: There were no one else's prints found inside the house. The DNA and fingerprint samples matched Robb's. The one blood sample they did have came from Robb's hands the day of the murder.

When Det. John Finor had tested Robb's hands for gun residue, he also found a spot of blood in the web of the right hand. The blood tested as Ellen's and explained to them why Robb repeatedly said that he touched his wife's face. Nothing at the scene supported Robb's story that a burglar had broken in. The door glass hadn't even been stepped on, and nothing was taken.

"There was another one I need to tell you about," Marino began, referring to an interview the day before with Rebecca Rector, a high school teacher at Lenape Regional in Medford who told him that she had called Ellen to invite her to her 50th birthday party, but Ellen had refused to go because she said her husband had given her a black eye. "She said Rafael treated her terribly," Rector told Marino, and it had been going on for about 10 years.

However, Marino told Castor to be careful. They'd talked to scores of people, and she was the only one who claimed that Robb had hit Ellen. When she first called, she gave the police leads on others to talk to. She then called again to talk about the black eye, claiming she had told Gershanick, but he said she had never mentioned it. The discrepancy in her story left Marino and Gershanick wary about her as a witness. In the end, never having seen the black eye herself, Becky could only talk about what she said Ellen had told her.

"I did tell them," she said later.

When it looked like they had covered it all, Castor, looking around the room, put out the question: "Is there anybody here who thinks we shouldn't arrest him?" No one said anything.

"Is there anybody here who doesn't think he did it?"

Silence . . .. except for Lt. Bruce Saville.

Saville advised Castor to hold off just a little while until they completed the last round of testing of DNA, blood, and prints. The lab was working overtime to get everything tested. They promised to have the results back first thing Monday morning.

"Let's just make sure there wasn't someone else in that house," Saville told him. He wanted to be extra careful that Robb hadn't hired someone to murder his wife. Castor agreed. The last thing he needed was to arrest the wrong man in a high-profile murder.

"OK," said Castor. Here was the plan: They set up to make the arrest on Monday, Jan. 8, 2007. If the tests showed something to stop that, Saville would get in touch with him right away.

They were all on board. The statement of probable cause would get one final update based on the information presented at the meeting and the final interviews and the last undercover visit by Tony Spagnoletti.

It was Friday. If all went as expected with the blood tests, the arrest would happen on Monday. But that information, Castor reminded everyone, was only for the people in that room.

On Sunday night, Gershanick called Ellen's brother, Gary Gregory, who lived outside Boston, and spoke to his wife, Kim, alerting her to come for Olivia.

On Monday morning at 9 a.m., Saville called Castor. "It's all her blood. We don't have a third party here. We got the results we thought we were going to get. He was our guy."