A former Elmira resident arraigned on charges in two Rochester-area slayings that occurred 14 years apart is under investigation in connection with two more killings -- and possibly more.

Robert Bruce Spahalski, 50, may have committed a number of serial crimes, Acting Rochester Police Chief Cedric Alexander said Wednesday. "There appears to be a long history of violence," he said.

Police say that Spahalski walked up to the front desk at the city Public Safety Building Tuesday morning and told two officers that he had killed a woman. Investigators later discovered the unclothed body of Vivian Irizarry, 54, in the basement of the Spencer Street apartment house where Spahalski lived.

Irizarry was beaten and strangled Friday afternoon, according to court documents. Police said Irizarry, who lived at 1886 Norton St., was an acquaintance of Spahalski.

Spahalski was described by his landlord, Kevin Turner, as a quiet tenant who had lived there with a cat and a woman he called his girlfriend for about four months. He said Irizarry, who said she was related to Spahalski's girlfriend, would visit frequently.

"There was no indication he was a murderer. He never even raised his voice. He was soft-spoken. I never even heard him say a curse word," Turner said.

Turner said he let police and firefighters into the basement. They found Irizarry's body in a back room and told him to leave. Turner said the basement was dark and, although Spahalski had access to it, there was no reason he would be down there. Turner said he once questioned Spahalski about wires that were torn out of the furnace, but he claimed it must have been caused by his cat.

Spahalski also disclosed to investigators Tuesday that he was responsible for the October 1991 slaying of Webster businessman Charles Grande, police said. In a signed statement, Spahalski said he and Grande argued over a money-for-sex deal, and he beat Grande to death with a hammer.

Spahalski was arraigned on second-degree murder charges in Webster Town Court just after midnight Wednesday, and in Rochester City Court later Wednesday morning. He was ordered held without bail.

Alexander declined to provide details on the two other slayings in which Spahalski may have been involved, other than to say they occurred in the city in the last 10 years or so. He said investigators are looking at other cases as well, both in Rochester and beyond the bounds of the community.

Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering, who called Spahalski an incredibly dangerous individual, said he was not suspected of involvement in any other slayings in Webster at this time.

Police said Spahalski has been in the Rochester area, off and on, since the 1970s. Spahalski grew up in the Elmira area and had brushes with the law as a young man. Stories published in the Star-Gazette in the early 1970s, when Spahalski was a teen, show arrests for arson at a school, unauthorized use of motor vehicles, burglary and criminal trespass. He served prison time on four occasions for burglary-related charges, the first coming in 1973 when he was just 18.

After surrendering himself to police Tuesday morning, Robert Spahalski provided a four-page signed statement about the Grande killing. In that document, he asserted that Grande met him downtown and agreed to take him to his Phillips Road home and pay him $60 for sex, as they had done before.

But when Grande only wanted to pay him $40, Spahalski said he grew angry and Grande punched him. "He was very strong and I felt it but that wasn't going to keep me from getting paid," Spahalski's statement said.

He said he grabbed a nearby hammer and struck Grande in the head three or four times, bludgeoning him to death. Grande's nude body was found on his bedroom floor on Oct. 4. In his statement, Spahalski said he covered it with a blanket, then turned up the heat to aid decomposition.

"They didn't dare charge him unless the case was ironclad, which it was not. We knew, and he knew we knew, but there wasn't anything we could do about it, really just wait for time to pass," Rose Van Dusen, Charles Grande's sister, said Wednesday. "It's been 14 years. It's been a long wait, but it's finally over. There's no relief. I'm not happy or anything. But justice is justice, whether it comes in 14 days or 14 years."

Two days before Grande's body was found, a man later identified as Spahalski had been pulled over in Rochester driving Grande's car, in the company of a suspected female prostitute. According to his statement, Spahalski presented Grande's driver's license to the officer and identified himself as the Webster man. Rochester police let him go but sent a report to Webster police.

Pickering said Spahalski's admission in the Grande slaying came coincidentally, just as Webster police were preparing to present evidence against him to a grand jury. He said Webster officials asked the New York State Police cold case squad to look into Grande's unsolved killing this spring, and the state police recommended some follow-up investigative actions several months ago.

Those actions -- checking fingerprint and DNA evidence from the crime scene against modern computer databases -- bore fruit just two weeks ago, Pickering said. Webster police were going to take the evidence to a grand jury soon, he said.

At the time of Grande's slaying, Spahalski said in his statement that he operated a male escort service with several clients from his apartment on Lake Avenue. That area was the epicenter of a series of unsolved slayings of women. One victim, Victoria Jobson, lived in the same building as Spahalski. Another victim lived across the street. Several others lived not far away.

All told, more than 30 Rochester-area women were killed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of them were drug users or prostitutes whose presence on the streets made them especially vulnerable.

Police officials said after White's death that it was possible, though not certain, that at least one other serial killer had been at work in Rochester during that time.

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