The shot came from behind, execution style, while he sat on his own couch watching TV. Robert Beckowitz never saw it coming. The man holding the gun was his best friend, James Glover. Sitting right beside him, watching it happen, was his girlfriend, Janine Clark.
Robert was 33 years old in the summer of 1982, living in a basement apartment on Woodbine Street in Northwest Detroit. He’d grown up in an orphanage with his brother Gerald, and his life had been a hard one. People who knew him remembered a biker, a troubled man, someone marked by the beatings he’d endured as a child. There are no known photos of him alive online.
The only image claiming to be his mugshot—from a 1977 arrest for drugs and weapons—appears to be a poorly rendered computer recreation, not a real photograph. What’s known is that he had a thick mustache and wore his long dark hair in a braid. That July evening, the three of them were together in Robert’s apartment. They watched a documentary about the Manson family, then switched to the Benny Hill Show.
It was ordinary, almost mundane. Then James excused himself, got up, and left the room. He came back with a . 45 caliber handgun and shot his best friend in the back of the head.
To this day, no one knows if it was planned or if Janine knew it was coming. But the days that followed suggest this was far more than a simple murder. High on crystal meth, James and Janine stripped naked and began cutting Robert’s body into pieces. Fourteen of them.
They used a hacksaw James had borrowed from his parents, sawing off his head, limbs, hands, feet, and genitals. They photographed every stage of the dismemberment, posing with the body in grotesque ways. In one photo, Janine smiles brightly at the camera while holding the hacksaw to Robert’s neck. In others, James defiles his former friend with an ice pick, stabbing him more than eighty times.
Some of the most disturbing images show James placing Robert’s severed genitals into his own mouth. Others show Robert’s decapitated head propped on a chair, posed with other body parts—sucking his own big toe, flipping off the camera, picking his nose. A member of law enforcement who later viewed the photos said they were as bad as anything he’d ever seen, including shotgun blasts to the face and decomposing bodies. The pair used two rolls of film, but only twelve images were ever leaked.
A roll typically holds twenty-four to thirty-six photos, meaning up to sixty images remain unseen—likely destroyed, along with evidence of even more depraved acts. Reports say James and Janine had sex on top of Robert’s dead body and used some of his dismembered parts in their acts, like some grotesque ménage à trois. By the end, there wasn’t much left of Robert. What remained was stuffed into black plastic garbage bags and hidden throughout his home.
On July 20th, Janine called the police and confessed to everything. When officers arrived at Robert’s Woodbine Street house, she claimed she’d been held captive by James. She was arrested for a parole violation tied to a previous bank robbery charge—details of which remain unclear. James, heavily sedated on drugs, was arrested on the spot.
At his initial hearing, James pled not guilty to second-degree murder, use of a firearm in a felony, and mutilation of a dead human body. He was held without bond and ordered to undergo a psych evaluation. After being found competent, he took a plea deal: guilty to all charges in exchange for thirty to fifty years in prison. He was sentenced on December 1st, 1982, appearing in court wearing a curly brown wig.
He offered no real explanation, only saying, “It’s a big puzzle. I cannot explain. ”
As of 2025, James has served nearly forty-three years of his sentence. He’s either been released or passed away—no records confirm either.
Janine, however, maintained her innocence throughout. She told investigators, “Jimmy told me don’t move and don’t make any noise. He said I’d have to stay there a couple of days because he had to get rid of the body. ” James even supported her claim, testifying that she didn’t stay of her own free will, though he admitted she was allowed to leave at various points.
Prosecutor Thomas Bane wasn’t buying it. He painted Janine as an enthusiastic participant, citing the two rolls of film. He told the court, “Look at her face. Do you see fear, revulsion, disgust?
I don’t think you will find those things. ”
He also pointed out that James, who used a cane due to a spinal cord injury, couldn’t have moved Robert on his own. Robert was 6’4″ and weighed nearly 250 pounds. Janine could have easily overpowered James and gotten away if she’d wanted to.
Neighbors disputed her story too, saying she was seen outside Robert’s house multiple times between the murder and her confession. Both James and Janine were spotted together at a local yard sale on the Saturday after the killing—twice. A neighbor reported hearing a woman shouting outside Robert’s house at 3:45 in the morning. Janine was also seen buying more film for the camera at a local store.
On February 3rd, 1983, Janine Clark was convicted of mutilating Robert Beckowitz’s corpse and sentenced to only six to ten years in prison. She was released decades ago and has since vanished from public record—either living clean or under a pseudonym. The case left a trail of painful questions. The three-bedroom ranch-style home where Robert rented his basement apartment was zoned as a single-family address, but the landlords, Ronald Franchey and Terrell Hargesheimer, had allegedly been renting individual rooms to people for years.
Neighbors said they’d complained to police and city officials repeatedly, even to Police Chief William Hart. City building inspectors had taken Hargesheimer to court in 1975 for illegal occupancy in the basement—the same basement Robert rented. A judge issued a warrant for his arrest, but the warrant was never served. It became useless after seven years.
And if the basement was occupied by multiple renters, how did no one hear a . 45 caliber gunshot? Robert’s legacy became something he never would have wanted. In the 1990s and 2000s, the twelve leaked photos became a fixture on shock sites like rotten.
com and Gore Gallery, circulated without a name or story attached. Many of those sites were shut down in the 2010s, but the damage was done. Robert’s memory became defined by what was done to him, not who he was. His brother Gerald served in the US Army during the Vietnam War and passed away on July 14th, 2003, at the age of fifty-six.
He was buried at Riverside National Cemetery in California. Robert’s remains were cremated, but his final resting place remains a mystery. In 2021, a film called The Degenerates, supposedly inspired by Robert’s story, was released. It received poor reviews, with critics describing it as boringly terrible and little more than two people filming and violating a corpse for an hour.
There’s so little left of Robert. No childhood friends to interview, no family quotes, no pictures of him smiling. There are no known photos of him alive at all. The only image claiming to be him is a heavily edited mugshot—likely a computer recreation based on photos of his severed head.
The case has been treated almost like an urban legend over the years, passed around through blog posts and shock sites with scattered, sometimes false, information. The motive remains speculation: perhaps James and Janine wanted to continue their affair without Robert in the way. But they never admitted to it. What bothers people most about the coverage of this case is how it gets sexualized.
Janine is described as a pretty woman, and the most famous image of this case shows her standing naked, smiling, holding a hacksaw. People focus on the gruesome photos and the twisted relationship, not on the man who lost his life. Robert Beckowitz was a man who survived a difficult childhood, a man with a brother, a man who lived a quiet life in a basement apartment in Detroit. And in the end, all the world knows of him is how he died—and what was done to his body afterward.
That’s his entire legacy, and it’s all the internet will allow anyone to see.
