Kriti Mehrotra
It was May 1990 when the entire world turned upside down for two families as 11-year-old Robin Cornell and 32-year-old Lisa Story were found horrifically murdered inside their townhouse. Unfortunately, though, despite the best efforts of loved ones as well as local law enforcement officials, it wasn’t until over 26 years later that this case was solved with the help of DNA evidence. This, and much more, has been explored in ID’s ‘On the Case With Paula Zahn: A Nightmare at Dawn,’ which even features exclusive interviews with Robin’s mother and others close to the matter.
Robin Cornell and Lisa Story Were Brand New Roommates
Born on November 30, 1978, to Jan Cornell as her second and youngest daughter, Robin Marie Cornell was undoubtedly the light of her family’s lives with her beautiful, bright personality. By all accounts, she was caring, kind, and somehow much beyond her years by the time 1990 rolled around, considering she already knew she wanted to be a professional writer when she grew up. She was just a bubbly, outdoorsy 11-year-old 5th grader with big dreams at the time, but alas, everything came crashing down in the early hours of May 10, 1990, as she lost her life. However, sadly, Robin wasn’t the only victim that day – her brand new roommate, as well as her mother’s co-worker and close friend, 32-year-old Lisa Diane Story, was also brutally killed. She was born on September 15, 1957, to Donna Howett and Kenneth Story in Ohio.
She had settled down in Cape Coral, Florida, while actively preparing to get married. Nevertheless, Lisa was ambitious, too, leading her to work at Cape Coral Hospital without negating her passions for photography and cycling. In other words, she was living a good, happy life. Little did anyone know that tragedy would strike within 24 hours of Lisa moving in with the Cornells (on May 9, 1990), just a few weeks after Jan’s eldest daughter, Jeni, moved out for college. As a single mother, Jan had once made a comment at work about thinking of renting out Jeni’s room after she leaves to help with finances, to which her co-worker asked if she was serious. One thing led to another, and Lisa officially rented out the room, shifted in her boxes, and then told Jan she would be happy to babysit Robin if she wanted to go see her boyfriend for a while, who lived nearby.
Robin Cornell and Lisa Story Were Found Dead in Their Respective Bedrooms
As per Jan’s accounts, she had left her townhouse at 10:30 pm, promising Robin and Lisa to be back in an hour since she wanted to get some sleep before her early shift at the hospital. She genuinely thought she would be back before midnight, but she ended up dozing off at her boyfriend’s place. It was around 4 am when she suddenly woke up in a panic and rushed home. However, she could not enter because the lock on the doorknob had been set into place even though everyone in the household knew not to do that since it didn’t work from the outside, making her feel uneasy.
Jan subsequently began calling out for both Robin and Lisa to let her in, only to reportedly hear some footsteps rushing inside, which made her call for them louder while banging the door. Eventually, she went to the backside in the hopes of figuring out another way to enter, just to find the sliding glass door to her kitchen wide open, with the vertical blinds eerily blowing in the wind. When she stepped inside, her heart dropped even further because the ironing board was set up and her family pictures, especially those of both her daughters, were laid out on it. That’s when she rushed upstairs.
According to Jan’s statements, she first peeked inside Lisa’s room and figured she was sleeping since she was lying on her side, but the scene was much different in her daughter’s room. Robin was lying naked on the floor with a rolled-up pillow under her abdomen, driving the single mother to dial 911 while attempting to revive her despite the fact that she was cold to the touch. It was only when officials arrived that Jan learned Lisa was also dead — as per the autopsies, both the 11-year-old as well as the 32-year-old had been sexually assaulted and asphyxiated/smothered with a pillow.
The Investigation Into Robin and Lisa’s Double Homicide Spanned 26 Years
When investigators arrived at the scene, they noticed the open sliding door, Lisa’s ransacked bedroom, footprints in the bathroom, a pair of white socks on a dining room chair, and 4 keys. This, along with the DNA recovered from the victims’ bodies, led them to hypothesise that the killer likely entered from the sliding door in the early hours of May 10, 1990, before looking around the house and later making his way upstairs. As per their theory, the assailant found Lisa sleeping and quickly took her life, only to then brutally attack Robin when she came to see what was causing the noise.
The police believed the 11-year-old was punched several times before she was killed, following which the perpetrator ransacked the home, violated both victims, and then took a shower. The items left behind by the killer also led them to think that they took his time to steal Lisa’s driver’s license, credit card, checkbook, as well as a customized wristwatch before he fled in a hurry. It’s possible that Jan did indeed hear their footsteps. As if that’s not enough, from the DNA recovered from Robin and the single strand of hair found on Lisa, they were able to ascertain that the person they were looking for was a white male with type O blood.
Detectives initially followed up on every male close to the Cornells and Storys, including immediate family members, friends, boyfriends, cousins, and more, but nothing concrete came of it. They then turned to the neighborhood, and while they soon thought they had their suspect after Jan revealed a creepy peeping Tom incident from May 9, 1990, he was soon cleared. Over the next 25 years, officials admittedly looked into hundreds of leads without ever closing the case, no matter how cold it got, only to suddenly get a breakthrough in the fall of 2016 when new DNA was submitted into the national database. It gave them a match.
Joseph Zieler Has Been Tried, Convicted, and Sentenced for the Double Homicide
In August 2016, when 53-year-old Fort Myers, Florida, resident Joseph Zieler was arrested on the charge of aggravated battery against his adult son following an unrelated fight. The duo reportedly got into such a heated argument that the family man ended up shooting his son with a pellet gun so hard that it broke skin on his chest, resulting in his arrest. As per routine, his DNA was subsequently submitted to the national database while he remained detained at Lee County Jail, just for it to match the evidence from the 1990 unsolved double homicide case. Investigators from Cape Coral immediately made the trip to question Joseph, but he claimed he didn’t recall much of his past before 1998 due to an accident that left him with cognitive issues. However, he had made no such remark after his initial August arrest, so they continued with their questioning and even got more DNA samples from him in the form of his saliva as well as hair.
While he was giving these samples, he seemingly incriminated himself by asking about the death penalty, making detectives believe he knew exactly why he was being interrogated this way. Officials then discovered that Joseph had a criminal history dating back to the 1980s, with his first arrest being for grand theft auto and burglary. Then, mere days after the double homicide, he was taken into custody for concealed weapons and resisting arrest, only to later seemingly turn over a new leaf for nearly 26 years. However, his 2016 arrest brought his past back to the front and center, especially as subsequent DNA analysis revealed a 1 in 700 billion match to both the evidence recovered from Robin as well as the hair strand on Lisa. With this, Joseph was formally arrested again on two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of sexual battery, and one count of burglary in 2016 itself.
On May 17, 2023, Joseph stood trial for the charges against him, claiming his DNA was in the townhouse because he’d had a sexual encounter with Jan months before the murders. When it was pointed out that his DNA should have been long gone by the time of the incident, even if his claims were true, he called the single mother “a pig who never washed her sheets.” Jan has always vehemently maintained that Joseph was a stranger to her until she was told about his arrest by detectives in 2016, which she reiterated under oath. In the end, with the mountain of evidence against him, he was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, for which he was given two death sentences a month later – one for each victim. The 62-year-old has since appealed this verdict, but until any decision is made by the Supreme Court, he remains on death row in the mixed-security Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida.
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