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Robert
Gary GIRTS
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics: Poisoner - To
collect insurance money
Number of victims: 1 +
Date of murder: September 2, 1992
Date of birth: June
24,
1953
Victim profile: Diane
Eileen Girts, 42 (his third wife)
Method of murder: Poisoning(Potassium cyanide)
Location: Cuyahoga County, Ohio, USA
Status:
Sentenced to life
imprisonment with a possibility of parole after twenty years
on June 11, 1993
United States Court of
Appeals For the Sixth Circuit
CINCINNATI — A former undertaker convicted twice of
killing his wife by giving her poison must be given another trial, a
federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, citing improper comments made by
the prosecutor in the man's second trial.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here ordered
Robert Girts, a Poland Township native, to be retried in six months or
be set free.
Girts, who worked at a funeral home in the Cleveland
suburb of Parma, was convicted in 1993 of aggravated murder in the death
of Diane Girts and was sentenced to life in prison. Prosecutors said he
gave her a fatal dose of potassium cyanide.
That conviction was reversed by a state appeals court
in 1994. Girts was convicted again the following year by a Cuyahoga
County Common Pleas jury, and that conviction was upheld.
Girts then took his fight to federal district court,
which ruled in 2005 that the prosecutor improperly commented on Girts'
failure to testify at his second trial, and that he got ineffective
legal advice. But the court declined to free Girts.
The prosecutor's statements were sufficiently
flagrant to warrant reversal, the appeals court said in its 2-1 ruling.
Diane Girts, 42, was Girts' third wife. She died in
1992.
Relative's reaction
"This was the day, Sept. 5th, that we buried Diane,"
Bettianne Jones of Columbiana said Wednesday. She was Diane Girts'
sister-in-law.
Jones worked last summer, taking a binderful of
information to the state parole board, to make sure Girts wasn't granted
parole. The board denied it, ruling him ineligible for parole for the
next 10 years.
She said she felt discouraged when she heard the news
Wednesday.
"I felt like all the air was sucked out of me." Her
husband, Barry, who was Diane Girts' brother, died in 1997, she said,
and he won't be with her for the third trial. She said she didn't think
she could go through it all again.
Once she absorbed the news though, she got angry. "I'm
thinking, bring it on," she said. "We'll have another trial, and we'll
convict him a third time."
SEX: M RACE: W TYPE: N MOTIVE:
PC-domestic
MO: "Bluebeard"
slayer of wives.
DISPOSITION: 20 years to life
on one count, 1993.
Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia
of Modern Serial Killers
