Henry Roberts Just after 4 a.m. on May 11, 1991, police were called to a house in northeast Baltimore, Maryland, that belonged to 62-year-old Henry Roberts, a retired steelworker.
Roberts said an armed man had broken into his house and tried to steal his television. Roberts said he confronted the robber, who shot him in the chest and also shot and killed his nephew, 21-year-old Robert Harrison. The robber also shot and killed Roberts’s dog.
According to the Baltimore Sun, Roberts spent several days in the hospital. Roberts told the police that his house had frequently been the target of robbers, and he occasionally paid Harrison to help protect him. He said he had been sleeping in his living room when he saw a man with a bandana over his face and a gun in his hand. Harrison was at the time sleeping in the back bedroom.
During the interviews, Roberts gave inconsistent accounts of the robber, describing him at times as Black, as white, and even appearing to be a woman.
Two months after the murder, two boys who said they were fishing for frogs in a creek that ran near Roberts’s house found a .22-caliber handgun in the water. The gun was registered to Roberts, although he told police that it had been stolen—along with a gold watch and some cash—from his house during a burglary a year earlier.
Through an examination not explained in the available records, the gun was tied to the shooting.
Separately, a nurse from the hospital said that Roberts had confessed to the shooting to her and told her a story about how he threw the murder weapon in a nearby creek. In addition, several of Roberts’s neighbors said that he and his nephew didn’t always get along.
Police arrested Roberts in September 1991, charging him with murder. Prior to trial in Baltimore City Circuit Court, his attorney, Michael Kaplan, worked out a deal where Roberts would plead guilty to manslaughter and receive a suspended sentence.
Judge Kenneth Johnson rejected the arrangement, and the case went to trial in January 1992. The state’s case was built around the apparent inconsistencies in Roberts’s account of the incident and the recovery of the murder weapon.
Years later, Kaplan would recall that Roberts was gruff and not the most sympathetic defendant. Kaplan said, “The biggest problem was that it was his gun. He told the Sun: “I argued that by telling the jury, here was a man who had been critically wounded, and it would have been very difficult for him to go someplace and hide the gun. But a police officer testified it could be easily done.”
After the jury convicted Roberts of second-degree murder, Judge Johnson sentenced him to 50 years in prison. According to the Sun, Roberts said, “My God” six times. “Fifty years for something I didn’t do? My God ... Your honor, I have never fired a handgun. Never.”
Johnson responded, “Sir, I’m convinced that the jury got it right.”
From prison, Roberts pursued his claim of innocence. For example, he wrote to an environmental reporter in 1994, seeking help in undermining the testimony of the boys about hunting for frogs in the creek. Roberts said the creek was too polluted, and he had never heard a frog croak in all the years he had walked his dog there,
On July 30, 1996, Roberts filed a petition for post-conviction relief. Prior to any action on the petition, Roberts died in prison on December 22, 1996. He was 68 years old.
In February 2000, Robert Stone came forward and told the police that 27-year-old Robert Tomczewski was the robber who shot Roberts and Harrison. Stone was 17 years old when the crime occurred, and he said he saw Tomczewski break into Roberts’s home and then heard shots. He said that he had learned of Roberts’s death and was racked with guilt.
The Baltimore police interviewed Tomczewski, who was in prison on an assault conviction. He denied involvement. A short while later, Tomczewski’s cellmate told investigators that Tomczewski had admitted that many years earlier he had “killed a guy in an old man’s house.” The cellmate’s details lined up with Stone’s account.
Police charged Tomczewski with murder on May 10, 2000. He pled guilty to second-degree murder on April 8, 2002, receiving a 10-year sentence.
During the reinvestigation, police learned that Tomczewski’s name had come up three months after Roberts’s conviction, based on a telephone call from an anonymous woman. The caller noted that Tomczewski lived in the same neighborhood as Roberts, and she gave the police other persons to corroborate her account. According to the police files, those leads didn’t pan out.
The reinvestigation also examined the inconsistent statements Roberts was said to have given in the hospital.
Mark Wiedefeld, a detective in the homicide unit’s cold-case squad, told the Sun, “This man had just come out of life-threatening surgery, so it appears that he must have been rambling. It looked like he was hiding something. But he wasn’t. He was just befuddled.”
Roberts’s case was never formally dismissed. A docket entry from June 6, 1997, regarding his petition for post-conviction relief, says, “Abated by death.”
– Ken Otterbourg and Stephanie Denzel
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