As a teenager, rampage killer Charles Roberts worked at a restaurant with two people who were involved in the brutal stalking murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1991, it was revealed yesterday.
That killing was perhaps the most lurid crime in bucolic Lancaster County, Pa., before Roberts took over an Amish school at gunpoint last week and shot 10 girls, killing five.
Roberts, 32, a milkman who claimed he was tormented by the desire to molest young girls – as he supposedly had done to two relatives 20 years ago -then shot himself dead.
On Saturday, Roberts was buried next to an infant daughter who died nine years ago, as about 75 mourners – half of them Amish neighbors – looked on. “It’s the love, the forgiveness, the heartfelt forgiveness they have toward the family. I broke down and cried seeing it displayed,” said Bruce Porter, a fire department chaplain from Morrison, Colo., who came to Pennsylvania to offer help and attend the burial.
Meanwhile, the five surviving girls remain hospitalized.
One, age 6, was taken off life support and taken home to die, but her condition reportedly improved and she was returned to the hospital.
In 1990, Roberts was working as a dishwasher at the Good-N-Plenty Restaurant in Smoketown, according to the Lancaster Sunday News. His co-workers included Lawrence Yunkin, then 19, and Yunkin’s girlfriend, Lisa Michelle Lambert, then 17. Roberts and Yunkin also reportedly played together in pickup football games on a field at Conestoga Valley HS.
In 1991, Lambert became pregnant by Yunkin and also became deeply jealous of a Conestoga student, Laurie Show, 16, who had briefly dated Yunkin.
Lambert stalked Show for months before her obsession turned deadly.
On Dec. 20, 1991, Yunkin drove Lambert and another teen friend named Tabitha Buck to Show’s condo after they duped the girl’s mother into going to the high school to speak to a guidance counselor.
Lambert and Buck confronted Show inside the condo, where Lambert slit Show’s throat.
Lambert and Buck were convicted of the killing, and are serving life sentences, while Yunkin served a dozen years in prison for his role in the crime.
Glenn Lapp, the owner of the Good-N-Plenty, told the Sunday News that his son pointed out the coincidence of two high-profile killers working together at the eatery as teens.
With Post Wire Services