Lyric Benson NLSTP

Date: 26 Apr 2003 14:33:44 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.gossip.celebrities
Size: 6,089 bytes

NY POST/By JOE McGURK, KENNETH LOVETT and HEIDI SINGER
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Robert Ambrosino was a sharp-dressing barfly, a charmer and a ladies man who
sipped top-shelf whiskey and often picked up the tab, his friends say. But pals
of Lyric Benson, the blond ex-fiancée he shot in the face before killing
himself, tell a darker tale.
They say he was a chronic liar nicknamed "Fast Bobby," who claimed he was a CIA
agent and bragged he once shot a man.
The doomed couple's friends agree on two things:
Ambrosino was cagey about how he earned a living and paid for his fancy clothes
and partying.
And he carried a gun - but nobody knew why.
That was likely the gun he used to shoot the gorgeous model and aspiring
actress in the face in front of her mother early Thursday morning before
blowing his own brains out.
Benson, 22, was pronounced dead at 11:30 a.m. yesterday.
"It's like they were Romeo and Juliet," mourned Ambrosino's former roommate,
Jose Rivera. "He just loved her so much he couldn't live without her."
Parishioners at her mother's Pentecostal church, in Beaufort, N.C., were
fervently preparing a prayer chain yesterday. Benson's Yale friends had been
planning an evening gathering in the New Haven bar where she and Ambrosino hung
out.
And in a grim Bellevue Hospital room, mom Deborah Janicke, bent over her
daughter's lifeless body and sobbed.
Ambrosino's corpse lay unclaimed in the city morgue yesterday, and no relatives
arrived at his Brooklyn apartment to gather his belongings.
The killer, 33, who grew up in sleepy upstate Mayfield, left behind seven or
eight hand-written notes to family members - saying he loved them, he was sorry
and that his decision was not "premeditated," police sources said.
The couple met when Benson, a Yale theater student, called New Haven radio
station KC101 to request a song, friends said. Ambrosino, a former merchant
marine, was working as an intern. He took the call.
Her friends at Yale were suspicious of the older man with the mysterious past.
One said he passed around pictures of himself in army fatigues, carrying a gun.
Others said he was known as a peddler of the club drug "ecstasy."
Friends and colleagues at Balthazar, the SoHo bistro where she worked as a
hostess, heard many of the same mysterious stories.
The couple, who moved to New York about a year ago, split more than a month
ago. Benson moved out of their shared Greenpoint apartment into a run-down
building on East Broadway, Chinatown, not far from the restaurant.
One associate said Benson had recently returned to her born-again Christian
roots. But friends say she just outgrew the relationship.
Ambrosino planned to move to SoHo, Balthazar's neighborhood, according to a man
he asked to room with him.
In the month after Benson dumped him, Ambrosino partied hard with that friend,
a 23-year old bartender and aspiring actor he met on his birthday in a Park
Slope bar. The two hit it off right away because they both liked to drink in
bars and talk about girls, the bartender said. He also did a little coke, the
young man said.
But the bartender, who asked that his name not be used, started to wonder when
he saw Ambrosino flash a handgun as he undressed one night.
"I crashed over at his house two weeks ago, and I remember he pulled it out,"
recalled the party boy. "I was like, 'What the hell do you have that for?' He
said something like, 'You got to be protected.' "
Cops say Ambrosino was busted in Washington, D.C., for carrying a gun without a
license.
The bartender never knew how he earned a living, recalling, "he always kind of
danced around it."
* * *
By MICHELE McPHEE, KERRY BURKE and TRACY CONNOR
NY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
A promising young actress gunned down by her suicidal ex-boyfriend in front of
her mother died yesterday at Bellevue Hospital. Lyric Benson, 21, had been in
extremely grave condition since being shot in the face by Robert Ambrosino
outside her Chinatown apartment early Thursday.
"It's a terrible tragedy," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
Benson was a Yale graduate who moved to New York to launch a showbiz career.
She had lived with Ambrosino, 33, in Brooklyn until their breakup a month ago.
Ambrosino, a pony-tailed drifter who planned to join the Fire Department,
apparently was distraught over the failed romance and had been harassing
Benson.
He staked out her East Broadway building and ambushed her when she returned
home - firing a .45-caliber bullet into her face and then fatally shooting
himself.
Benson's mother, Deborah Janicke, a school teacher who lives in Beaufort, N.C.,
was visiting her daughter and witnessed the slaying, police said.
The family was too grief-stricken yesterday to talk about Benson, described by
friends as a vivacious and talented actress.
A hostess at SoHo's Balthazar, Benson had just gotten her first breaks with a
small part on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" and an American Express ad
campaign.
Ambrosino's parents, meanwhile, traveled from upstate Gloversville to the city
to identify his body at the morgue, family members said.
Relatives were stunned by the tragedy.
"That totally doesn't sound like him," Sally Ambrosino, who is married to the
gunman's cousin, told The (Gloversville) Leader-Herald.
"In school ... he was smart and he wasn't in a bad crowd or anything. He was
very popular."
His former math teacher, Stan Pulver, said he saw Ambrosino at a wedding not
long ago and he seemed "pretty good, pretty up."
"I sure wouldn't expect anything like that," Pulver said.
Bill Stewart, a family friend who was Ambrosino's soccer coach at Mayfield High
School, also had no inkling that anything might be wrong.
"This really is such a tragedy," he told the paper. "It's one of those things
that happens that nobody will ever understand. I have great sympathy for both
families."
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