Mar 20, 2014 - The Investigation Discovery show “Evil Twins” will feature it second episode. Stephen was serving time for manslaughter in Attica, N.Y., at the time for stabbing a man to death. Robert would become a serial killer, eventually convicted of. The murders of the Spahalski brothers is the subject of the 2010. Meanwhile, Robert became addicted to crack and became a serial killer. At one point, the brothers were both convicted of murder and served out their sentences in the same jail.

Michael Benson Michael Hanlon I have danced with evil, stared unblinkingly at depravity, and poked at the brains of psycho killers. I have memorized playfully sadistic crimes, creepy-crawly methods and motives, and, after a beat of digestion, popped the results out in book form, packaged to give readers the willies in the middle of the night. I’m a true crime writer.

I get Christmas cards from a cannibal, and three times I have covered murders most foul right here in the Rochester area. My fascination with evil stems from childhood trauma.

On June 25, 1966, when I was nine, my babysitter, George-Ann Formicola, and her friend from just down the road, Kathy Bernhard, went swimming in Black Creek behind the Benson house off Ballantyne Road in Chili—and didn’t come home. A month later they were found two miles to the west horribly mutilated by a knife. Monroe County had its very own Jack the Ripper. The case was never solved, and it was too ghastly to be covered in detail in the newspapers of the day. I grew up knowing that a real-life boogeyman had crossed my back field. Even as a kid, paralyzed by fear, I wanted answers, to solve the crime, to find out who the monster was. I grew up to become a true crime writer.

Not a coincidence. In the 1990s, I read every true crime book. My Manhattan office was a crazy quilt of detective magazines with bright, vivid covers of lingerie-clad babes packing heat and newsprint innards as gray as a Monday morning corpse.

I learned plenty about serial killer Arthur Shawcross, convicted of killing eleven women in Rochester during the 1980s. Earlier in life, he had killed two children in the Watertown area. The thing most fascinating about Shawcross was the fictional biography he gave a shrink after his Rochester arrest. He recounted his days in Vietnam, alone on jungle patrol. Coming upon a pair of “Vietcong chicks” swimming in a stream, he killed, mutilated, and cannibalized them. The man was clearly confessing to something, but his records showed that he had never been in a position to patrol a jungle, alone or otherwise.

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Change jungle to woods and Vietnam to Chili and he could have been describing “my” murders. By the early 2000s, true crime was already my obsession, and I figured I might as well make a living at it. My first crime book was about a family affair in Penfield: Betrayal in Blood. In July 2003, diminutive lawyer Kevin Bryant sleepily called the cops to report that he’d been upstairs reading while an intruder came into the house and shot his wife, the beautiful and much-younger Tabatha. The tapes of that 911 call are shocking. Bryant is the calmest man in the history of 911 calls.

At one point it sounds as if he yawns. As the story unfolded, Rochester received a lesson in the depths of human depravity.

Bryant had lifestyle issues. Despite a bad ticker, he was into hookers and blow—sometimes in a motel room, sometimes in the strip joint, sometimes right there in his office—while Tabby toiled as a teller at the drive-in window of a branch bank and took care of their two little boys. One of Bryant’s cocaine buddies was Cyril Winebrenner, Tabby’s half-brother, a guy with mental problems, whose girlfriend Cassie turned tricks. Kevin tried to get Tabatha to become a swinger with him (and all that that implied). Instead, Tabatha sought the real love she needed elsewhere and found a boyfriend.

When her husband learned he had been cuckolded, he proclaimed her dead meat and hired Tabby’s brother Cyril to murder her, promising to pay him off in cocaine. While the couple’s boys and Kevin were upstairs in bed and Tabatha was on the couch downstairs, Cyril entered the home, shot Tabatha in the eye, only wounding her, jammed the gun, and finished the job with a knife, which managed to unsparingly spatter the living room ceiling with her blood. Cops immediately suspected the husband, not just because cops always suspect the husband, but because that fuss downstairs must’ve been noisy as hell, yet Kevin’s reaction was somnolent. By the time he got to the top of the stairs and looked down into the horror that was his living room, he said the intruder had gone. He heard a car pull away.