The following appears courtesy of the 12/7/99 online edition of The Long
Island Newsday newspaper:
Plea Deal Nets Killer's Brother Two Years
BY: By Erik Holm. STAFF WRITER
EDITION: NASSAU AND SUFFOLK
DATE: 12-07-1999 A26
In exchange for pleading guilty to four counts of helping his
sibling dispose of the bodies of his victims and hindering prosecution,
Barry Shulman, the brother of convicted serial killer Robert Shulman,
will serve two years in Suffolk County jail, Suffolk County Court Judge
Arthur Pitts said in court yesterday.
The announcement of the plea deal came in the third day of a hearing
to determine whether Barry Shulman's confessions to police were
admissible at trial. After a short closed-door meeting among Pitts,
Assistant District Attorney Patricia Brosco and Shulman's attorney, John
Kase, Shulman stood and admitted to helping his older brother hide the
dismembered bodies of two prostitutes he had killed separately in 1994 and
1995.
His confession in court yesterday was mostly a series of quiet yeses
to questions read aloud by Brosco, although when the prosecutor twice
asked Shulman what exactly he had done, he held his hands stiffly at his
sides and replied simply, "I helped him dispose of the body." Shulman,
40, will serve one year for each of the two bodies he helped his brother
hide, Pitts said. He had faced up to 16 years in jail for two felony
counts of unlawfully disposing of a body, and two felony counts of
hindering his brother's prosecution. The district attorney's office and
the father of the second victim had maintained that Shulman deserved the
maximum sentence, since he did not report his older brother to police
after learning of the first murder.
"That's a slap on the face for me and a slap on the wrist for him,"
said John Bunting Jr., the father of Kelly Sue Bunting, whom Robert
Shulman killed and dismembered in December, 1995. "I am really mad right
now. I feel helpless." Minutes after Brosco called Bunting at his office
near Los Angeles to inform him of the plea bargain, Bunting said that
Brosco had just told him that Pitts was amenable to a plea bargain
because he was looking to clear his calendar before he became a Supreme
Court justice in January. But Bunting said he felt that the district
attorney's office was not aggressively pursuing Shulman's prosecution.
"I don't know who was trying and who wasn't," Bunting said. "There
are too many factions here, too many interests. I just don't think any
one of them cared enough about this case." Pitts could not be reached
for comment late yesterday afternoon.
Before the plea deal was announced, Brosco read a statement in court
saying prosecutors had wanted the maximum sentence, and contrasted
Shulman and his inaction with David Kaczynski, who turned in his
brother, "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, when he suspected him of sending
letter bombs.
Kase dismissed the comparison "It's one thing to have a man who was
a college-educated professor who hadn't seen his brother in 20 years
recognize that his brother was a suspect after identifying his
writings," Kase said after the plea. "It's another when you have a
10th-grade education and live in the room next door to your domineering
and controlling older brother, as Barry did. It was only after the
police questioned him that he realized what he had done was wrong."
Bunting said yesterday he didn't buy Shulman's defense. "You can't tell
me he didn't have sense enough or brains enough," he said. "If he can
use a telephone, he can dial 911." Robert Shulman's murder trial in the
deaths of two other women in Westchester County begins there today.
Barry Shulman could still face charges there similar to the ones he
pleaded guilty to yesterday.
