Criminal Twins
Can twins share a propensity for criminal behavior?
Common Traits
Twins, especially identical ones, share special bonds. They can sometimes communicate in a way that appears to be telepathic. However, occasionally, twins turn out to have a shared propensity for crime and violence.
Will one, neither, or both turn out to be evil?
The Spahalski Twins
As with many identical twins, Robert and Stephen Spahalski had a high degree of closeness. They were both gifted gymnasts and both had an uncanny ability to know exactly where the other was at any given time.
But they had a dark side in common—it wasn't just one twin that was evil; they were both murderers.
The Spahalski brothers grew up in the 1960s in Elmira, New York in the state's southern tier, not far from the border with Pennsylvania. Their parents divorced when they were 12, but this likely had little to do with their criminal leanings.
They were quite young when they started committing crimes. It began as burglary and arson and escalated.
The Spahalski Twins
Stephen Spahalski
In 1971, when he was just 16, Stephen attacked a store owner named Ronald Ripley, who was 48. Stephen Spahalski said Ripley had made homosexual advances towards him, so he hit the store owner with a hammer.
He finished him off by stabbing him; one account says there were 47 wounds on Ripley's body. This is the sort frenzied attack in which the killer has shifted into an altered state of mind.
Investigators had suspected the murderer of Ripley was Robert but Stephen stepped forward and confessed to manslaughter. Showing little insight into his motivation, Stephen said: “I don’t talk on it. If I kill someone, I kill them for a reason. That’s all I know.”
He was released from prison after eight years but found it impossible to behave himself. A burglary sent him back behind bars. A second parole ended the same way.
Robert Spahalski
While Stephen was serving his time, his brother Robert seems to have had a crisis of conscience. One November morning in 2005, he walked into a Rochester, New York, police station and announced he had killed someone.
Spahalski told detectives he and Vivian Irizarry had been smoking crack cocaine when he “flipped out.” He said he was in a drug-induced haze when he hit Vivian with a blunt object. He finished her off by strangling her with a cord. Officers were sent to Spahalski's home and found Irrizary's naked body in the basement.
Spahalski was already known to police; they had suspicions about his involvement in murders in 1990 and 1991. He had been questioned about the deaths of a man and a woman in separate incidents but police had been unable to assemble enough evidence to lay charges. Now that their suspect was in a confessing mood, they probed him on those cold cases.
Apparently, feeling the need to get things off his chest, Spahalski owned up to killing Charles Grande, who was clubbed to death with a hammer in 1991. Then he confessed to strangling 24-year-old Moraine Armstrong in 1990. In both these cases, sex and drugs were involved.
Although police had other unsolved murders they wanted to clear, the man they had in custody wasn't willing to take the blame. For some reason, he did not want to be labelled a serial killer and erroneously believed the definition for that title was four or more victims.
The official FBI definition is “the killing of two or more people by the same offender or offenders over a period of time, with a specific intent to terrorize, intimidate, or injure.”
Then Spahalski stumbled into admitting to the killing of 35-year-old Adrian Berger, saying “She got stupid and I choked her out.”
By the time the case came to court, Spahalski had changed his mind and entered a not guilty plea. However, his four confessions were allowed into evidence along with a mountain of other material that pointed to his guilt. The jury took three hours to agree with the prosecution and Spahalski was handed four 25-year sentences to be served consecutively.
More Criminal Twins
There are several other examples of twins engaging in crime:
- Stefan and George Spitzer used the drug Rohypnol to sedate women in order to sexually assault them. The twins were immigrants to Canada from Romania and they committed their crimes in California in the 1990s. Police found 20 video tapes of the men raping and sodomizing their many victims. They were both given decades-long prison sentences that were greatly reduced on appeal. Released from jail, they were deported to Canada and have since been in more trouble with the law.
- Keishon and Kenyata Blake were 18 years old when they attacked and killed Maria Rivas, 62. In late December 2014, Ms. Rivas was walking home in south Los Angeles after buying items for Christmas dinner. The twins' motive was the theft of their victim's purse. The brothers already had a history of crime when they received life sentences without parole for murdering Rivas.
- Joel and Michael Stovall are serving life sentences plus 896 years for a string of crimes they committed in September 2001. A night of violence started when Canon City, Colorado Deputy Jason Schwartz responded to a call about someone shooting a dog. The brothers were arrested and placed in Schwartz's truck. But they were not properly searched and Michael pulled out a gun and shot the officer in the head. The twins pulled the officer from his vehicle and shot him 16 more times. They stole a truck and shot another police officer in the spine, leaving him paralyzed. A chase ensued in which other officers were wounded, but eventually the troublesome twins were apprehended.
- Orlando or Brandon Nembhard got away with murder. One of the identical twin brothers shot and killed Sir Xavier Brooks, 19, outside a nightclub in Chandler, Arizona. Some witnesses identified Orlando as the shooter, others said it was Brandon who pulled the trigger. Authorities have never been able to determine which of the two men committed the 2011 murder.
There have been several other criminal twins and psychiatrists have tried to identify nature or nurture as the cause. The consensus seems to be that there is a small genetic component to be found in criminal twins, but that upbringing plays a more prominent role.
Bonus Factoids
- Ronnie and Reggie Kray were identical twins born in London, England, in 1933. They grew up to be feared, vicious criminals who ran a gang that terrorized the British capital in the 1950s and '60s. You can read more about them here.
- DNA left behind at the scene of a multimillion-dollar robbery in Germany in 2009 was found to match two men—Abbas and Hassan O. Because the identical twins had the same DNA, police had to release the brothers. You can read more about this story here.
- There is a rare psychiatric disorder known as folie à deux ("the folly of two"). It's a psychosis in which two or more people share the same hallucinations or delusions. In a bizarre incident in England in 2008, Swedish identical twins Sabina and Ursula Eriksson ran into motorway traffic and were injured when hit by vehicles. Later, Sabina murdered a man who offered her assistance. At trial, Sabina's lawyer used a folie à deux defence, saying that Ursula suffered from psychotic delusions that infected her twin sister. The strategy didn't work and Sabina received a prison sentence.
Sources
- “Rural New York Twins Killed Separately, Served Time Together.” Erik Hawkins, oxygen.com, October 31, 2019.
- “Genetic Violence: Robert and Stephen Spahalski.” Katherine Ramsland, crimelibrary.org, undated.
- “Jury Convicts Twin Brothers in Date Rape Drugging Case.” Sue McAllister, Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1998.
- “One of Two Brothers Sentenced to Life Without Parole in Fatal Stabbing of Woman During South L.A. Robbery.” Cindy Von Quednow, KTLA, May 2, 2019.
- “A Night of Terror: September Anniversary of Stovall Shootings.” Rachel Alexander, Canon City Daily Record, April 15, 2019.
- “Twin Brothers Complicate Arizona Murder Investigation.” ABC News, July 29, 2011.
This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.
© 2024 Rupert Taylor
