The State - News from June 24, 1987

A Sacramento man who had already been freed after a death sentence for murdering his three children, received a second death sentence from a Santa Clara County Superior Court jury for later killing his former wife. Robert Henry Nicolaus, 53, had first been sentenced to death in 1964 for murdering his three children, ages 2 to 7. But the California Supreme Court later reduced his crime to second-degree murder, and he was paroled from prison in 1977. The mother of the children later remarried, becoming Charlyce Robinson. The prosecutors said that Nicolaus lured Robinson into a Sacramento alley on Feb. 22, 1985, and shot her twice in the chest with a .25-caliber handgun. Before she died, Robinson identified Nicolaus as her assailant. The trial for Robinson’s murder was transferred to Santa Clara County because of excessive pretrial publicity.