Convicted Robber Charged in ’09 Murder of Jeweler

Baltimore--A 26-year-old man in prison for orchestrating the elaborate 2013 armed robbery of a suburban Baltimore jewelry store has been indicted in the 2009 slaying of another jeweler on the same road.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland announced Tuesday that Stanislav “Steven” Yelizarov now faces a federal murder charge in the Dec. 26, 2009 death of Wayne Ruder.

Ruder was 56 at the time he was killed and had owned Ruder and Company Jewelry and Antiques, located in the 6900 block of Reisterstown Road in Baltimore, for two decades.

Though the indictment did not elaborate on how police connected Yelizarov to the nearly 7-year-old murder, Ruder’s brother told the Baltimore Sun that Yelizarov was an acquaintance of his brother’s and had been a rumored suspect in the case for years.

“We knew that’s who did it,” he said, according to the Sun.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Yelizarov faces a maximum sentence of death or life in prison.

He currently is serving a 30-year sentence for being the ringleader of the 2013 armed robbery of Antony Jewelers and the kidnapping of one of the store’s employees, as well as an earlier home invasion in which he stole the guns used in the jewelry store robbery. Antony Jewelers is located on Reisterstown Road in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mill.

He was just sentenced in April.

According to the indictment in that case, Yelizarov recruited a group of men and began plotting the robbery in November 2012.

One of the men, identified in court documents as Grigory Zilberman, befriended an Antony Jewelers employee in order to learn more about the store as well as the habits and routines of the employee.

Yelizarov later attached a GPS tracking device to the employee’s car.

According to court documents, on Jan. 15, 2013, Zilberman invited the employee to his home and notified his co-conspirators when he left.

The group, led by Yelizarov, then tracked down the employee in a rented sports-utility vehicle with a “law enforcement-type light bar” stuck on the top and pulled him over, as if they were police officers.

They then bound and blindfolded him, put him in the trunk and drove him to a remote location, where the perpetrators then forced the employee to give them the keys and code to alarm system at the jewelry store, which they robbed of $500,000 in jewelry, gemstones and watches.

Yelizarov is