Court update:
Robert Jufer, whose Hastings-on-Hudson home was not searched during the exeuction of an arrest warrant on Feb. 6, waived extradition during a hearing in Westchester County Court Thursday and is heading back to Pennsylvania. It is currently unknown if Jufer has obtained an attorney, according to the Wayne County District Attorney’s Office. Attempts to contact Jufer were unsuccessful.
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Hastings-on-Hudson police helped Pennsylvania State Police arrest Robert Jufer of High Street Feb. 6 in connection to the fatal shooting of his wife in 2010.
They arrested the 71-year-old outside his current home on a homicide charge. Hastings-on-Hudson and Pennsylvania State Police officers set up surveillance of the High Street home on Feb. 6 and arrested Jufer outside his home just before 8 a.m. without incident.
Members of the Greenburgh Police Department and Westchester County District Attorney’s Office also assisted with the investigation.
The murder occurred Oct. 17, 2010.
Police said Jufer had said that when he arrived home after a trip to Wal-Mart, he was attacked in his home in Cherry Ridge Township Pennsylvania and knocked unconscious.
Police found his wife June Jufer, 68, dead of a shotgun wound to the head in her bed after Robert Jufer called police from a neighbor’s home to report the attack after he regained consciousness.
As police investigated, Jufer is alleged to have given conflicting reports of the attack, the Wayne County District Attorney’s Office said. Also, Jufer’s lack of injury to his neck along with physical evidence at the scene didn’t match up with his story, according to law enforcement officials.
“Jufer went so far as to say he used the murder weapon earlier that morning to ‘look for a muskrat’ near the residence and returned to the home where he placed it on the kitchen table before going to Wal-Mart,” said a press release from the district attorney’s office. “He admitted that he did not look for his wife or arm himself with a weapon before fleeing the residence after the alleged attack.”
Police also found 108 rifles, shotguns and handguns in Jufer’s Pennsylvania home. The weapon located in his wife’s bedroom was the same weapon that killed her. Police did not execute a search warrant for Jufer's Hastings-on-Hudson home.
Jufer is expected to appear in Westchester County Court Feb. 7, for an extradition hearing.
“This was a despicable crime committed against a helpless wife by a man who behaved as a survivalist keeping over 100 different weapons in his home in Pennsylvania,” said Pennsylvania District Attorney Janine Edwards. “The evidence collected in the sear warrant of the Jufer home, specifically the weapon that killed June Jufer being owned by Robert Jufer, and a piece of rope found in the kitchen which Robert Jufer claimed he was strangled by matching a spool of rope found in the Jufer basement, demonstrates a staged crime scene for a murder committed by Robert Jufer.”
This report was derived from information from law enforcement officials. It does not indicate a conviction.
