cover image Killer Twins

Killer Twins

Michael Benson. Pinnacle Books, $6.99 (340pp) ISBN 978-0-7860-2205-2

Rochester, New York experienced a plague of serial killers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with at least three killers operating in the Edgerton section of the city. True crime writer Benson's latest hones in on one of them: Robert Bruce Spahalski. After his arrest, police found themselves with an unusual serial killer, in that his victims varied so much in terms of race, gender, and even method of death. Even more unique was the fact that Spahalski had an identical twin brother, Stephen, who was also a murderer. Given this wealth of macabre oddness and accounts of violence, one might expect a livelier book, but Benson's text reads like a police report with a few of the numbers filed off. The overall story of the twins is difficult to pick out of the mass of details, and the book frequently supplies extraneous information.