I knew he was
in trouble when he was sleeping with a 9 millimeter
under the couch.
He was deep in gambling debts.
I knew right away
this is not going to end well.
It occurred in broad daylight.
Two armed men approached the truck
and took away a sack of cash with $1 million in it.
One of the suspects was wearing a Santa Claus outfit.
We needed someone on the inside
to lay it all out for us.
CLIFFORD It looked
like the body was killed somewhere else
and buried in a snowbank.
Loose lips sink ships
and usually end up with a bullet hole in you
somewhere along the way.
Southington, Connecticut--
it's a quiet town, middle-class workers.
A lot of them worked in factories.
The town is approximately 28 square miles.
It's rather rural.
It's not a place where
many crimes are occurring.
December 20, 1989,
we were getting a lot of snow.
It was below zero.
It was that cold.
That morning, one of the captains
came in and said, I believe we have a homicide.
The pastor of a church discovered
somebody buried in the snow.
I went to West
Center Street, where the crime scene was partitioned off.
And sure enough, there was
a body on top of a snowbank.
It was pretty obvious
that the person was deceased.
Rigor mortis had set in.
He was stiff.
He certainly was not breathing.
The victim had red hair, red beard,
and an emerald earring in one of his ears,
and appearing to be about 25 years old.
We asked the reverend
if he knew who this person was or had ever seen him before,
and he had not.
After a few minutes of looking around,
it was quite obvious to us that the person did not die there.
There was no sign of any struggle whatsoever.
There was a snowstorm that night,
but there was no tire marks in the snow.
It appeared that he was just thrown out
of a vehicle because of the way he was laying on the snow bank.
I remember thinking, nobody took time to hide it.
They were rushing.
Someone was just looking for a dark place
just to get rid of the body.
Then I noticed the blood.
It looked like he had bitten through his tongue.
I saw strangle marks around his neck, telling me
the victim had been strangled to death.
We really had no clue as to who this person was
and why he was murdered.
MICHAEL DE We need
to find out who murdered him and to bring them to justice.
Connecticut--
it's a small state.
It's not all Martha Stewart.
We're not all fancy houses.
It's more working class than it is the wealthy.
I grew up in New Britain, a working-class city.
The pubs and bars are more of a friendly meet-your-buddies kind
of place.
It's really a small city, a little rugged.
We were raised to always protect each other.
There were six of us kids.
The two oldest hung out a lot together.
The two youngest hung out a lot together.
And then there was me and Robert in the middle,
and we hung out a lot together.
Robert was just goofy.
He took goofy pictures.
He was always somebody that you could rely on.
When I was 10,
my brother Robert and I were out in the driveway, shoveling.
Mom came out with a suitcase.
A friend of hers picked her up.
And Mom said goodbye, climbed in the car.
We never saw her again.
Just gone.
I just don't think that she
was cut out to be a mom.
It hurt my dad real bad.
Mom leaving was pretty difficult.
And for all of us six kids, we got into some trouble
probably because of it.
There was some pain, disbelief.
Robert asked what caused it.
Was it us?
It was pretty rough on Robert for a while.
It was tough.
Clear!
After high school,
Robert went in the military.
He was stationed in Germany for two years as military police,
and he loved it.
He came home, and he did a lot of odd jobs.
He did landscaping.
He worked as a Loomis armored car guard, which made sense,
but he really wanted to get his own business.
Robert worked as a bartender, bouncer
at Zindies, a bar in Canton.
Jeff Stenner was the owner of Zindies.
And Robert was like, he's going to help
me become a business owner.
We're going to work together.
He's helping me.
In 1986, Jeff purchased Bankers.
He called it Bankers because it was an old bank,
and it had a bank vault in it.
Jeff wanted to turn it into a restaurant.
Robert was working for Jeff, helping him, fixing it up.
He loved it.
He wanted to do big things.
He had big dreams.
Robert and Jeff got to be buddies.
They did a lot of things together.
He was just a really good friend of Robert's.
Robert lived in New Britain with me.
Robert worked at nights.
I worked days.
He would borrow my car, which was
fine as long as he was home in the morning
so I could go to work.
After a while living with him, I could
sense something was going on.
He would get up and run to the window
and look out any time a car would stop.
And I kept asking him what was wrong.
And he would tell me, what you don't know can't hurt you.
And I knew he was really in trouble
when he was sleeping with a 9 millimeter under the couch.
Robert wasn't small.
He was 230 pounds.
So for him to carry a gun, yeah,
it's kind of a telltale sign something's up.
On December 19, 1989, he got dressed.
He was going to work.
They found the gun under the couch after he was gone.
That was unusual because that gun went with him everywhere.
Later, he called me from Bankers
and told me that he had to go to New Haven.
The next morning, I get up,
and my car wasn't in the driveway.
And Robert wasn't on the couch.
I started calling around.
I couldn't find Robert anywhere.
I didn't know where he was.
That was not like Robert.
Robert was reliable.
If I said, you can use my car, but I need it back by 12:00,
he was there by 12:00, always.
There was just a gut feeling.
I just knew something was not right.
He owed everybody in town
and had IOUs all over the place.
You don't know who's dealing the cards.
They could set you up and then take you for it all.
Robert confiding
in me was mind numbing.
And I'm like, you got to be kidding me.
I was stunned.
It was a total setup from the beginning.
December 20, 1989.
In the morning, I got up, and my car wasn't in the driveway.
I started calling around, trying to find my car.
And I couldn't find my brother Robert anywhere.
I didn't know where he was.
That morning,
in Southington, the captain got the phone
call that there was a body found in a church parking lot.
The body was frozen,
solid like a block of ice, buried in the snow bank.
There was no signs of a
struggle there.
There was no footprints, no blood in the snow.
And it looked like the body was killed somewhere else
and dumped there.
We had snow that night.
And rigor mortis kicks in a lot quicker when it's that cold.
The victim was tall.
He had red hair and a red beard.
He had an earring in his left ear.
And we noticed some blood on his face
and the groin area of his pants.
And we didn't see any bullet holes or anything like that.
You could see strangle marks
on his neck, which went all around except for the back,
making me suspect that he was strangled in the sitting
position from behind, but probably
in a car because the headrest would
prevent the ligature marks to go completely around his neck.
I also found, on top of the body,
a glove manufactured by Boss.
The body had no identification
on it whatsoever.
We really had no clue as to who this person was.
The snow and the snowbank hadn't
been disturbed hardly at all.
There's no tire marks, nothing.
I knocked on a few doors, some of the neighbors.
Nobody had seen anything.
At that time, the body was taken to the coroner's office.
We went back to the police station.
Sent an APB out to all police departments
informing that we had a victim--
no ID, red hair, red beard, an emerald earring
in one of his ears, and appearing
to be about 25 years old.
Not long after that, a detective from
Canton, Connecticut--
calls and says,
it might be a guy he knows, a bouncer named Robert Schmidt.
This detective said that he worked for a guy named
Jeff Stenner, who owned that Zindies bar and the Bankers bar
in New Britain.
So we reached out to Jeff.
He told me that him and Robbie were good friends.
I asked him to come with us to the coroner's office
and make an ID.
Then, when the sheet was pulled,
I saw Jeff kind of hesitate.
You could tell that this affected him.
And he goes, yeah, that's Robbie.
And he was quite upset.
I get a phone call,
and Jeff told me that they had found Robert's body.
It just-- it shattered my life.
I mean, Rob was my friend.
He was the one I called when good things happen.
Stunned, flabbergasted,
denial, heartbroken.
Not what a holiday is supposed to be.
And it has changed everyone ever since.
For sure.
One of the first things we did was we ran
Robert Schmidt's background.
That's something we always do.
And he had a pretty clean record.
During the investigation,
we brought in Robert's two brothers, Steven and Keith,
to find out if there is anyone who
wanted to hurt their brother.
They said that on March 4, 1987,
Robert Schmidt was working with the Loomis armored car services
when he was the victim of an armed robbery
while he was working.
CLIFFORD Anyone who
was involved in that robbery, if they felt that Robbie was
ratting them out, that would be motive enough
for them to kill him.
Two years later, Robert Schmidt was
found deceased in a snowbank.
Is there some connection between these two cases?
We were not quite sure.
The brothers also said that Robert Schmidt was
a pretty good-sized gambler.
I found out that Robert was
gambling through the police.
I was shocked.
You don't know who's dealing the cards.
They could set you up and then take you for it all.
The next day, I
started interviewing people that were employees
of Bankers restaurant.
We interviewed the owner, Jeff Stenner.
He also led me to believe that Robbie was deep in gambling
debts, owed to everybody in town
and had IOUs all over the place.
His sister Laura told us he was being paranoid,
carrying a gun with him.
I thought maybe it was gambling debt.
I knew that this was probably a good motive to kill him.
According to the people I spoke to,
Robbie was supposed to be picked up by someone at 10
o'clock that night.
He left the downstairs lounge and went outside.
Nobody saw him after that.
The owner, Jeff Stenner, was telling me
that Robbie's car he had borrowed
from his sister, Laura, was in the parking
lot outside of Bankers.
When I approached the car, it was unlocked.
I found that kind of odd, especially
in that section of town.
I popped the trunk.
I look in.
I find some rope, which is approximately
the same circumference of the ligature marks
on the victim's neck.
I look underneath the seat, and I find a tag from Boss.
And I remembered there was the Boss glove that
was found on top of the body.
I talked to Laura about the rope
in the trunk and the glove.
And she said, no, it's not my glove.
And she said, I had no rope in the trunk of the car.
I said to myself, bingo, this is it.
This car is where he was murdered.
On the morning of December 20, 1989,
Robert Schmidt was found murdered, buried in a snowbank.
We believe that he was killed in the sister's car.
Then we seized
Robbie's sister's Honda Civic.
We process it from the front to the back.
We check for fingerprints, we check for DNA,
and we wait for their results to come.
During one of the interviews
with Robbie's boss, Jeff Stenner,
he led me to believe that Robbie
was deep in gambling debts.
I thought that maybe this was why he was murdered.
If he had a lot of debt, we needed to find
who would want to kill him.
Christmas time, 1989,
we spent that entire holiday knowing we
had to bury my brother.
We did Robert's wake on the 26th.
I've never seen my father weak until then,
to watch him bury his son.
Dad's aged, like, 100 years in that period of time.
As the detective,
I always go to the wake to pay my respects,
and sit there and just listen and watch.
You never know what you're gonna find out.
I see Jeff Stenner walk into the funeral parlor.
And with him is his wife, Jill.
Jill was really uncomfortable.
She just wouldn't look at me at all.
Not long after the wake, Robbie's father
told us Jeff had asked the funeral director for a death
certificate on Robbie Schmidt.
My father was furious that Jeff Stenner
had the audacity to show up at our brother's wake
and ask for a death certificate.
That's ballsy.
So I brought Jeff Stenner
back in for another interview.
He informed me that he had life insurance
policies on key employees in the amount of $100,000.
It was just a way to protect his business.
Needless to say, I find that suspicious.
It goes to motive.
He was the beneficiary of a lot of money.
So that changed my attitude of Jeff Stenner.
He went from being a friend to a suspect.
After that, I started interviewing customers who
had been at Bankers restaurant the night prior to the body
being found.
I spoke to a man.
He was a stockbroker.
And he says the night of December 19,
he saw Robbie Schmidt with Jeff Stenner in the parking lot
with two guys.
His words, they looked like bodybuilders.
It took me a while to put a name on these two guys.
I was talking to an undercover New Britain narcotics officer.
Through my talking to him, giving him a description
of these guys, he came up with two names, Scott
Cancel and John Grzesczcyk.
So I went directly to Scott Cancel's place.
And John Grzesczcyk is there.
And I ask them about the story.
They're corroborating what the stockbroker told me.
Scott Cancel said, yeah, we were in a parking lot.
I was talking business with Jeff and Robbie.
They want some renovation done.
We didn't have probable cause to take their fingerprints,
so I checked on both of them.
And John Grzesczcyk had no fingerprints on file at all.
And he had no criminal record at all.
Scott Cancel had an extensive police record.
So I took Scott Cancel's fingerprints that were on file
and had the forensic lab check them to see if they match
any of the fingerprint list that
was obtained off Laura's car.
There was no match.
But I never wrote them off.
Every person we
had available, we interviewed.
We did everything.
But it got to the point where nothing was coming our way.
And then one day, Robbie's
brother Jay came to my office.
And he said that he had something to tell me.
I told the police
that my brother and I were having a drink together,
hadn't seen him in a while.
And he asked me, do I know anything about Santa Claus
robberies in West Hartford?
He said he was part of it.
And I said, what?
What are you-- what are you talking about?
He was shaky, scared.
He said, yes, Jeff robbed the armored car
in a Santa Claus suit.
I didn't say anything because I was the only one that knew.
It's a brother's bond.
We're not going to snitch on each other.
But Robert ended up dead, so I told them everything.
Jay said that on December 20, 1988,
Jeff Stenner was the lone gunman.
And he made Robbie Schmidt the driver of the getaway car.
It was just a total setup from the beginning.
My brother said, Jeff's the only one that saw the money.
I knew Robert was scared.
I think Jeff had Robert in his pocket.
I said, if Dad ever finds out, dude, you're done.
My father would've dragged him right to the police station.
They knew right away this is not going to end well.
Loose lips sink ships, usually end up with a bullet
hole in you somewhere.
$1.8 million total was stolen.
His jaw dropped.
He says, OK, I'll tell you everything I know.
CLIFFORD If they felt
that he was renting them out, that would be motive enough
for them to kill him.
Late December 1989, Robbie's
brother Jay came to my office.
And he said that he had something to tell me.
Jay said, because Robbie had told him that Robbie had been
involved with an armored car robbery
with his boss, Jeff Stenner.
Anyone who was involved in that robbery,
if they felt that Robbie was ratting them out or talking
to the feds, that would be motive enough
for them to kill him.
Unfortunately, Jay is just telling me a story.
He didn't have any concrete evidence.
It's all hearsay information.
So I couldn't get enough probable
cause to make an arrest on it.
I was at a dead end on this.
And so the case got cold.
I arrived in the summer of '91
to Hartford as a brand-new FBI agent.
We were investigating two separate armored car
robberies, one in March of '87 and the other
in December of '88.
We believed that it was Jeff Stenner
who robbed the armored cars.
We just couldn't prove it.
MICHAEL DE LA The first robbery
was on March 4th of 1987.
Two armed men approached the Loomis truck
while it was making a delivery and took away a sack of cash
with $1 million in it.
The FBI found out, at the time, Robbie Schmidt
was working for Loomis and was one of the guards
that had been robbed.
We now believe Robbie Schmidt was the inside man.
There was that theory that Stenner was manipulating Robbie
Schmidt into doing this.
The second armored car robbery was on December 20 of 1988,
and it occurred in broad daylight.
One of the suspects
was wearing a Santa Claus outfit.
And he and his associate took almost $800,000.
So $1.8 million total was stolen in both.
Based on the description of one of the witnesses
at the Santa Claus robbery, we had the newspapers
put out the sketch.
It just didn't match anybody.
But suspicion was cast on Jeff Stenner and his associates
because Jeff Stenner and his wife, Jill St. John,
were going to the banks with hundreds of small amounts,
$3,000 and $4,000.
Some of the deposits were occurring
the same day of the robberies.
Unfortunately, that is not enough to charge them
because you need to prove the underlying offense
to show that the money was gotten through illicit means.
MICHAEL DE LA Robbie Schmidt
was found murdered on December 20 of 1989,
on the one-year anniversary of that second robbery.
Talking to Detective Cliff Saucier,
we thought that if we could at least find Jeff Stenner
guilty of the armored car robberies,
it would put pressure on Stenner and his cohorts,
and that the charges would bring
leverage against Jeff Stenner in the murder
of Robbie Schmidt.
We were up against the timeline because the statute
of limitations for bank robberies is five years.
So I only had until March of '92 to solve the case.
The clock was ticking.
I really need someone
on the inside to cooperate.
So according to the files, we believe that Stenner
also used his employees.
I went to one of the waiters, and I knocked on his door.
And the minute I introduced myself,
I knew that he had been involved in the robbery.
I could just tell by his demeanor.
He denied any involvement, but I told him I'd be back.
We only had less than a month left on the clock
before the statute of limitations expired.
We had to get our witness to cooperate.
We needed someone on the inside to lay it all out for us.
And so I kept going back three or four more times.
I went to his house once more.
I said, look, I have a grand jury subpoena for you.
If you don't tell the truth, you
could get in a lot of trouble.
And his jaw dropped.
He says, OK, I'll tell you everything I know.
He agreed to cooperate, and so we agreed not to charge him.
And then I put him in a motel under an assumed name.
He was fearful for his life.
He said, we all know Jeff Stenner killed Robbie Schmidt.
And they were friends.
I'm not even his friend.
So he'll kill me without even batting an eyelid.
And then, late January of '92,
I finally got this witness to cooperate.
We were up against the clock because we only
had a few days left before the statute of limitations
expired on March 4.
The next morning, we got the arrest warrants for Stenner,
and we prepared an arrest plan.
The day of the arrest,
we all got together very early in the morning.
The FBI team and Detective Saucier was with us as well.
On January 30, 1992, three years after Robbie Schmidt
had been murdered, we effected the arrest of Jeff Stenner
at his condo in New Britain, Connecticut,
for the armored car robberies and the money laundering.
After all the evidence was presented
against him, including the witnesses,
Jeff Stenner agreed to reach a plea deal with the government
to avoid a trial.
He agreed to plead guilty to the second Santa Claus robbery,
and the first robbery was dropped.
He was sentenced to eight years in federal prison.
The $1.8 million in cash to this day is unaccounted.
At the time of Jeff Stenner's arrest for the armored car
robberies, we did not have enough evidence
to link him to the murder of Robbie Schmidt.
But the hope was that by charging him
that we could shake something loose with his accomplices that
would help in that homicide investigation.
At that time,
I got promoted to detective sergeant.
So now I was in charge of the entire detective bureau.
One of the first things I did was
to tell two of my detectives, go through everything.
Re-interview people that we've already interviewed.
And I want you to resubmit all that evidence
we have back to the lab again.
We get a hit, this time on a fingerprint that was gathered
from the rear-view mirror next to the driver's
side out of the car where Robert Schmidt was killed.
We found out the fingerprint belongs to a John Grzesczcyk.
CLIFFORD The first time
I interviewed John, he had no record,
had no fingerprints on file at all.
But now, 2000, he applied for a gun permit.
In Connecticut,
when you get a pistol permit, you have to be fingerprinted.
That means now that person has fingerprints
that are in the system.
So now, this time, we did have a hit on the fingerprints
that we found in 1989.
Your heart does beat a little faster when you get some very
good evidence like that.
It just opened up the case wide.
CLIFFORD The detectives
went to interview him.
At first, he played like he didn't remember the murder.
So they turned the pressure up on him,
showed him some pictures from the crime scene.
And then they showed him the results of the
fingerprint identification.
And that's when he said he was involved.
We learned that John
had completely turned around.
He was married.
He had a family, never got involved in any trouble.
So he was willing to testify and give up
whatever information he had for some leniency
from the state's attorney.
CLIFFORD He confesses
to being the driver of the car wherein Robbie was murdered.
And then he gives them the guy who
did the actual strangling in the back seat,
a guy named Delgado.
John Grzesczcyk also tells investigators
that night they were being followed by Scott Cancel
and a guy named Salvatore Zampi in another car.
John Grzesczcyk and Delgado each got $1,000 by Jeff
Stenner to do the murder.
Now we had enough new information
based on the fingerprints and interviews
to get a warrant for Jeff Stenner.
Jeff Stenner was the mastermind.
He was the planner.
He was the manipulator.
He was the one pulling all the strings.
And he hired these people to, quote unquote,
"take care of" Robbie Schmidt.
We're going to get every single person
involved in that homicide.
In the summer of 2001,
we got the hit on that fingerprint
we collected from the rear-view mirror in 1989.
We found out it belongs to a John Grzesczcyk.
They went and interviewed him.
He told them that Jeff Stenner hired people
to have Robbie Schmidt murdered because he
thought Robbie was ratting to the FBI
about the bank robberies.
So they were able to get arrest warrants
for all of those involved.
So two detectives
went out to the prison.
When Stenner saw him, he right away knew who
they were and says, hi, boys.
Are you here because I'm getting out of prison tomorrow?
And they said, you know, a matter of fact,
we have a warrant for your arrest
on the Robert Schmidt case.
John Grzesczcyk pled guilty.
Delgado pled guilty.
Zampi pled guilty.
John Grzesczcyk drove the car, and Delgado
strangled him to death.
So they were both sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Salvatore Zampi,
for his role in the crime, received three years in prison.
But Scott Cancel and Jeffrey
Stenner wanted a jury trial.
Scott Cancel's trial
took place in 2002.
John Grzesczcyk testified to everything
that took place inside the vehicle on December 20, 1989.
According to their confessions,
Jeff Stenner had paid Scott Cancel
to hire two or three men to have Robbie Schmidt murdered.
Jeff Stenner sent them on an errand.
And then Robbie went along because Stenner was his boss.
John Grzesczcyk drove Laura's Honda Civic,
while Robbie sat in the passenger seat.
And Gilbert Delgado rode in the back seat.
Eventually, John parked the car near Southington Reservoir.
Robert had no idea what was happening when
Gilbert Delgado pulled a rope around his neck
and strangled him.
Around midnight, John and Gilbert pulled into a church
parking lot in Southington.
And John Grzesczcyk and Delgado
got out of the car and grabbed Robbie
and pulled him into the snowbank.
And then they left.
And then Salvatore Zampi
threw out their clothes.
They were all associates
of Jeffrey Stenner.
And they did this at the behest of Jeffrey Stenner.
Jeff Stenner got away with it
for a while, but not for long.
After the trial, Scott Cancel was convicted
for first-degree murder.
The judge sentenced him to 60 years in prison
for his part in the murder.
At Jeff Stenner's trial, I testified
that Jeff came in as a friend and mentor for Robert Schmidt
and that he did the hiring for this murder.
I believe Jeff wanted to eliminate
Robbie to prevent him from talking to the authorities.
The jury found him guilty.
And the judge sentenced him to 60 years in prison
for first-degree murder.
Knowing that Jeff is going to go to jail
for life is satisfying.
But it'll never take the pain away.
Never.
My brother was only 26.
He was just a boy trying to become a man.
And it's a shame that his life was ended in such
a drastic and horrible manner.
It's 35 years.
Some days, it feels like yesterday.
I want the world to remember
Robert and his big heart.
I try to remember more of the smile, and the goofy grins,
and the guy he was to me.
He's missed.
He's loved.
I wish he had the opportunity to be a dad.
I know he would have made an amazing uncle.
I wish my girls got a chance to meet him.
I miss my friend.
I just miss my friend.