Truck driver sentenced for killing four people
A Bedford CLEVELAND — truck driver already convicted of killing a man in 1997 will spend at least 30 years in prison for killing four others in the past 21 years.
Robert Rembert Jr., who pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of aggravated murder and two counts of voluntary manslaughter, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 30 years.
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Joan Synenberg handed down the sentence Tuesday.
Rembert, who the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office once called a serial killer, raped and strangled Rita Mae Payne in 1997 and raped and strangled Kimberly Hall in 2015.
Both women had a history of prostitution, and Rembert, after killing them, displayed their bodies “prominently so as to be shocking to whoever discovered them,” according to court records.
DNA tied Rembert to the 1997 killing of Rena Payne, who was found raped, beaten and strangled in the bathroom of a Cleveland RTA bus turnaround at East 83rd Street and Central Avenue.
Rembert was an RTA driver at the time and had the code to the locked bathroom, prosecutors said. Payne’s last phone calls were to Rembert, prosecutors said.
Rembert, 47, left Hall’s bloodied and beaten body in a field on East 83rd Street and Gill Avenue. Her body was discovered June 10, 2015.
Rembert on Sept. 20, 2015 fatally shot his cousin, Jerry Rembert, and longtime family friend Morgan Nietzel at a home on East 140th Street where all three lived.
Robert Rembert stole Nietzel’s SUV. He was arrested driving her SUV at a Medina County truck stop the day after the killing.
Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty in the case but in June dropped the death-penalty portion of the possible punishment, leaving life without parole as the maximum sentence Synenberg could impose.
In a 2015 news release announcing Rembert’s indictment, then-Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty labeled Rembert a “serial killer” and said the FBI was assisting in a nationwide investigation to determine if Rembert left behind more victims.
Rembert has not faced any additional charges in the three years since the announcement.
Rembert previously served six years in prison in connection with another death.
In 1998, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of Dadren Lewis, a 24-yearold man killed the previous year in Cleveland, according to court records.