71-Year-Old Survivalist Charged with Wife’s Murder

Robert Jufer told police in Cherry Ridge Township, PA a frightening story in 2010: that when he arrived home after a trip to Wal-Mart on Oct. 17, he was attacked in his home and knocked out. Jufer, after regaining consciousness, called police from a neighbor’s home to report the attack. 

Police found his wife June Jufer, 68, dead of a shotgun wound to the head in her bed.

Now Pennsylvania State Police have arrested the 71-year-old. 

He is alleged to have given conflicting reports of the attacks, the Wayne County District Attorney’s Office said. 

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.

Hastings-on-Hudson and Pennsylvania State Police officers set up surveillance of his current home on High Street Feb. 6 and arrested Jufer outside 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.

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 search 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.”

Jufer’s lack of injury to his neck along with physical evidence at the scene also 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.”

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