STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.— More than three decades after a Rosebank woman was strangled to death in a neighborhood school yard, the man convicted in the slaying has again been denied parole.
Police responded to reports of a dead body outside PS 13 on the morning of Oct. 11, 1992. They discovered the victim, 44-year-old Linda Demers, strangled to death with a pair of stretch pants.
Her killer, now 65-year-old John Rispoli, was denied parole this year for the sixth time, records show. Serving a prison sentence of 25 years to life, Rispoli will have another shot at freedom in late 2026.
A Freedom of Information Act request for the transcript of the parole board hearing has been submitted to the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.
Just a short walk from home
On the morning of Oct. 11, 1992, police responded to a report of a woman’s body in the schoolyard outside PS 13 in Rosebank.(Google Maps)
Authorities investigating the case surmised Rispoli, then 32, initially met Demers at a bar on Bay Street.
Several hours later, between 3 and 4 a.m., they ran into each other on the street and Rispoli offered to walk her home. They were making their way through the schoolyard when the murder unfolded, prosecutors said.
Detectives called to the scene hours later determined Demers had been strangled with a pair of stretch pants. She was a short walk from her home.
In a 2017 interview, Demers’ family said their emotional wounds hadn’t healed, and they were not ready for her killer to be free.
In this 2017 photo, Demers’ daughter, Lynn Salvatore, was among dozens of people who gathered at Richmond University Medical Center in remembrance of family members lost to violence. Salvatore spoke and performed at the event.Paul Liotta
“Linda was like my second mother,” Janet Demers Woodall, Linda’s younger sister, said at the time. “There was a hole punched in my heart forever from her death.”
She recalled Demers taking her to the circus and dressing her up for holidays. “The pain and the emptiness can’t be healed,” she said. “Time doesn’t heal this. You just learn how to cope with it.”
2021 parole hearing 
John Rispoli, now 65, is being held at the Midstate Correctional Facility in upstate New York serving a sentence of 25 years to life.Google Maps
During a 2021 parole board hearing, Rispoli denied killing Demers.
Rispoli admitted he had been drinking heavily for many hours prior to Demers’ death. He said booze blotted out large portions of his memory of that night, but that he believes someone else who had been with him killed the 44-year-old victim.
He did not identify that person, however.
“I didn’t just pick up a woman from what they say, and she refused to have sex with me, and I said, ‘Oh, I am going to kill her.’ That is not me,” Rispoli told the board in 2021. “I met monsters (in prison) that have no regard for life. I am not like that.”
The panel at the time said it was most struck by Rispoli’s “lack of insight … and a lack of compassion for the victims in your past.”
Prior to the 1992 murder case, Rispoli had done prison time for a violent attempted robbery, according to state records.
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