Essex County Prosecutor’s Office

The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office is the county agency responsible for assembling and presenting the state’s murder case against Robert “Skeet” Douglas. In the book, it represents the prosecutorial arm of a criminal-justice system that begins moving immediately after the killings of Estella Moore and Charlene Moore. Its work turns a confused sequence of violence, witness uncertainty, police procedure, and delayed litigation into the formal prosecution known as State of New Jersey v. Robert Douglas.

Institutional Role and Early Investigation

The office began acting alongside the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender soon after the murders, though both institutions moved slowly. Thomas Lechliter, the Essex County prosecutor assigned to the case, interviewed the police officers who had first entered and searched the crime scene and the detectives investigating the killings. From those interviews, he reconstructed the events beginning on the night of Friday, August 7, 1987, when Georgianna Broadway, Estella Moore, and Charlene Moore gathered at the Moores’ apartment, and ending with Skeet’s arrest on Sunday, August 9, near Branch Brook Park.

The prosecution’s initial narrative centered on Georgianna’s account. After surviving gunfire, she drove to her roommate Deborah Neal’s home on Palm Street with Charlene’s baby and wearing Estella’s blood-soaked trench coat. Before being taken to University Hospital, she told Officer Alfred Rizzolo that Skeet had shot her in apartment 2E at 7 Chestnut Street in East Orange and that two women were dead there. Her identification was made under extraordinary conditions: she was critically injured, suffering shock and blood loss, and had been drinking, smoking cocaine, and awake for much of the night.

The police search produced additional material for the prosecutor’s case. In Skeet’s apartment, officers found drug paraphernalia, marijuana, cocaine, an empty black gun holster, two weighted fighting gloves, and a Rolodex. During an initial warrantless search limited to looking for weapons, Captain John Armeno noticed a framed photograph of Skeet in a bright green tuxedo and top hat, swinging a bejeweled cane. The photograph was taken to the hospital, where Georgianna, intubated but conscious, nodded when asked whether the pictured man was the shooter and began to cry. She later acknowledged that she had not seen the gunman, but said she recognized Skeet’s voice from the kitchen after having met him once, a week earlier, when he came to repair the sisters’ faulty door.

Building the Murder Case

The office used the hospital identification to obtain a formal search warrant for apartment 2D and access Skeet’s Rolodex. Information from that address led Detective Sergeant Alan Sierchio and three uniformed officers to Irving Gaskins’s third-floor apartment on 13th Street in Newark, near Branch Brook Park. Skeet was found there beside Gaskins, a seventy-eight-year-old family friend connected to an oxygen tank because of emphysema, diabetes, and heart disease. During the arrest, Gaskins pleaded with the officers not to shoot because a stray bullet could rupture the tank and endanger his grandchildren.

According to the police report, officers found a loaded Taurus Spesco .38-caliber revolver tucked into Skeet’s pants. The weapon held six rounds, and Skeet had five additional live rounds in his pocket. Ballistics experts later reported that the striations on bullets removed from the murdered women matched the revolver’s barrel. The gun also bore distinctive markings corresponding to the holster found in Skeet’s apartment. For the prosecution, the weapon connected Skeet to the killings more concretely than the unstable eyewitness identification could do by itself.

Lechliter reviewed transcripts, reports, photographs, and inventory lists and became confident that the evidence would produce a conviction. He treated the recovered gun as the decisive object in the case: it had allegedly been found on the suspect soon after the murders, and the ballistics evidence linked it to the bodies. The office therefore proceeded with a case whose central structure was straightforward: a surviving witness placed Skeet at the scene, Georgianna identified him as the shooter, and the weapon associated with him matched the bullets.

Yet the prosecutor’s own review exposed substantial weaknesses. Georgianna had been intoxicated, under the influence of cocaine, severely overtired, and hungover; she had encountered Skeet only once and claimed to recognize him by voice rather than sight. The interval between the reported shooting at approximately 7:30 a.m. and the 911 call at 9:30 remained unexplained, as did the fact that the bodies were still warm when officers arrived. Skeet was known as a drug dealer but had no prior convictions or history of violence, and no interview had produced an apparent motive.

The initial search of apartment 2D also created procedural problems. The police had removed the tuxedo photograph without a warrant, and officers gave conflicting accounts about whether the gun holster had been found before or after the warrant was issued. Because the holster had been concealed under dirty clothes, finding it during the limited initial search could have required more than the law permitted. The absence of a motive and the possibility that evidence had been planted or mishandled did not stop the prosecution. Lechliter believed the loose ends could be resolved before trial, while the recovered weapon supplied what he considered sufficient grounds to proceed.

Trial Strategy and Conviction

The delay before trial was shaped partly by the failure of the public-defense system to provide Skeet with continuous representation. After his arrest, a public defender filed a plea of not guilty, but the office later denied representation after citing the value of Skeet’s Pierson Street house and a pending civil claim. For nearly a year, Skeet appeared in court without counsel while he fought for the right to legal representation. The resulting confusion left witnesses uninterviewed and contributed to a three-year interval between arrest and trial.

Jury selection for State of New Jersey v. Robert Douglas began on September 10, three years and one month after the murders. The prosecution presented its case over six days. Lechliter did not press witnesses to establish a motive, and the defense did not make the absence of one the center of its presentation. Instead, the office relied on the same compact evidentiary foundation assembled after the arrest: a witness placing Skeet at the crime scene, Georgianna’s identification of him as the shooter, and a murder weapon allegedly owned by and recovered from him.

The defense called only three character witnesses: a junior-high basketball friend, the mother of another childhood friend, and a Pierson Street neighbor. Each testified to Skeet’s kindness and aversion to trouble. Lechliter’s cross-examination reduced the prosecution’s challenge to a single question asking whether the witness had been in apartment 2D on the morning of August 8, 1987. Each answered no. The defense case lasted less than an hour.

The jury nevertheless struggled to reach a verdict. Its deliberations lasted longer than the trial itself, and jurors repeatedly requested a reading of Georgianna’s testimony. The jury may have been unsettled by the unevenness of her account, by the visual imbalance of nine white police officers testifying against one Black defendant, or by the defense argument that police in an area known for corruption might have planted the revolver in Skeet’s belt. After the judge ordered them to continue deliberating, the twelve jurors returned a guilty verdict on two counts of first-degree murder, aggravated assault on Georgianna, and possession of an unregistered handgun.

Appeals and the Limits of the Prosecutorial Narrative

The office’s case continued to shape the legal struggle after conviction. In 1997, Rob Peace, Skeet’s son, and the pro bono lawyer Carl Herman filed a petition for postconviction relief. They argued that Skeet’s constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated and that the prolonged denial of counsel had severely prejudiced the defense. Their argument emphasized Irving Gaskins, who had reportedly said at the time of the arrest that Skeet possessed no weapon but died before giving a formal deposition that could be introduced at trial.

The postconviction litigation challenged not only the verdict but the procedural conditions that had enabled the prosecution to present its evidence. A former public defender testified for the state that the defense had been adequate, that a three-year delay was not unusual in a capital case, and that Gaskins’s statement would not necessarily have changed the result because it concerned what Gaskins had not seen. The lawyer also argued that the delay had helped Skeet by allowing the defense to prepare mitigating factors and avoid the death penalty.

Rob later found a lawyer in Toms River willing to pursue one final appeal after reviewing the extensive legal record and visiting Skeet in prison. The six-page brief argued that Skeet’s postconviction relief had been overturned under an improper standard of review. On August 16, 2006, the appeal was denied. The judge concluded that the District Court had applied the correct standard in reviewing the Appellate Division’s decision.

The office’s institutional victory therefore remained shadowed by questions that had never disappeared: whether the surviving witness could reliably identify a shooter she had not seen, whether the police had lawfully found the holster and weapon, whether the delay deprived Skeet of a meaningful defense, and whether the case’s material evidence proved guilt or merely supported the state’s most coherent story. The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office succeeds in converting those uncertainties into a conviction, but the book keeps the uncertainties visible, making the prosecution’s confidence part of the case’s moral and procedural tension.