Читать книгу Talking with Serial Killers: Dead Men Talking - Christopher Berry-Dee - Страница 10

CHAPTER 1

JOHN EDWARD ROBINSON

THE SLAVEMASTER

The following account of John ‘JR’ Robinson’s career of crime and murder offers the reader, and student of criminology, a unique and remarkable insight into the warped and perverted mind of a true, blue-chip sociopath and sado-sexual serial killer.

This chapter should also provide psychologists, psychiatrists and law enforcement with food for thought for it clearly illustrates how even the most intransigent of mentally entrenched psychopaths can be easily manipulated into exposing the deepest workings of their clearly dysfunctional minds. And as this chapter draws to a close, you might consider how Robinson will react when he reads this book and discovers that it is he, the master manipulator, who has been hoodwinked. My bet is that he’ll hit the roof.

* * *

Those unfortunate enough to be invited into John Robinson’s world soon found out that it was not one of refined elegance and gentle self-indulgence, as he would have us believe. Instead its epicentre was administered by a liar, scrounger and a cheat on the run for misrepresentation and commercially ritualised fraud. His was a world that deliberately surrounded itself with an impenetrable, pretentious and often plain misleading hypocrisy; his words churned out by a misleading snake-oil salesman who delighted in the obscure and the shadowy, the indistinct and the imprecise.

In search of metaphors even more elaborate, the two faces that this man displayed – the respectable businessman and sado-sexual serial killer – were so close together that they could be accurately described as twin cheeks of the same fat backside. This is a description which will do nothing to endear me to JR at all, for he will view me destroying his gilt-laced reputation as wicked as slaughtering a sacred cow.

Mr Robinson’s over-inflated ego always had, and still does have, a front larger than any major high street department store. At face value, the façade is impressive, hinting at an honest deal to be had within. ‘Integrity’ shouts at one peering through the glass windows, but it is not until one steps through the door, and walks around the displays inside, that the penny drops. John Robinson, the persuasive owner of the store, is the ultimate con-artist. He is the ‘quack’ of old, peddling phoney medicines and selling goods at over-inflated prices. He is the purveyor of Mickey Mouse, bamboo-spring, ‘Rolex’ watches, passing them off as the real thing. And if you purchased an item from the JR Robinson store, and complained afterwards, would you get a refund? No way, José!

And, in a kind of warped sort of way, this is why I was attracted to JR, the ultimate I-don’t-give-a-fuck merchant, a sort of homicidal Del Boy, whose history, and character, no imaginative screenplay writer could ever invent.

For me, however, the first challenge was to open up a dialogue with this heinous serial killer. He had never cooperated with an author before, or pretty well anyone else for that matter, so realistically I didn’t expect him to admit to a single wrongdoing to me either. You see, JR is ‘innocent’, or so he now says after already admitting to five of at least eight murders that he’s committed. If the truth be known, I did not even expect a reply to my initial letter either.

My second task, assuming the first mission was successful, was to discover whether there was any substance to his deep-seated claims supporting his integrity as a decent and honest man. He says he is totally innocent of all of the crimes for which he is incarcerated. He says he has been ‘framed’ by a crooked prosecutor and a bent judge. He says he never once used the internet to trawl for potential victims, moreover, he categorically states that he was most certainly not into BDSM, or master/slave contracts… God forbid!

Nevertheless, I baited my hook with a cocktail of goodies that this particularly nasty little man might find attractive, then, like the ever-optimistic fisherman, I pulled back my old beachcaster and cast out the line. Then I waited, and waited, and waited some more. I guess that JR sniffed at my lure, swam around it a few times – for a few weeks to be precise – and then sniffed again. The rod tip twitched, the temptation too much for this murderous con man; they say that the easiest person to con is the con man himself. JR took the bait and ran with it… and he ran hard. Then, like any fighting fish, once hooked, he tried to spit the barb from his mouth. The shiny lure was not all that it appeared… all that glittered was not gold.

For a short while, I had landed one of the most twisted serial killers in criminal history. But then, like so many of these cowardly individuals faced with a difficult question or two, he flipped and flopped about, slithering back to the murky water. However, in doing so, he fell into a net from which there could be no escape, and the fascinating results of what happened are published here.

* * *

Robinson sweats hatred, the copious secretions dripping out of every pore of his ageing skin. Having pleaded guilty to a number of shocking murders to escape the death penalty, John E Robinson is now demanding $400,000 to prove his innocence. His letters, featured in this chapter, explain that if he is not funded he will use college students to publish his poetry – well, actually other people’s poetry which he claims is his - to raise some of the money. The entity that is JR is a damning indictment of a sado-sexual sociopath, a social parasite who exhibits not one iota of remorse for his crimes, insulting his dead victims and their next-of-kin.

I want $400,000, although that amount may be adjusted depending on need. My attorney will control all information and distribution of funds.

John E Robinson, letter to the author, 20 February 2008.

The bespectacled inmate squinting into the Olathe Police Department booking camera lens is that of a flabby faced, real estate wheeler-dealer lookalike who mortgaged his soul to the Devil. This is John Edward Robinson, a depraved sado-sex sadist who tortured and murdered women then stuffed their corpses into steel drums to rot in their own bodily juices until they were discovered by sick-to-the-stomach police.

An outwardly honest businessman, whose shady dealings and rip-offs took him to prison several times previously, John Robinson has since admitted five murders to escape the death penalty. More recently he has been charged by federal authorities for committing murder across state lines. And, my first question to him was simplicity itself:

John, can you please, please explain to me how the bodies of five women you knew very well ended up in steel barrels, three in your storage locker and two more on your land?

He replied:

I received your 2 January letter. At first I was simply going to forward it to my attorney to place in the file of vultures flying overhead wanting to pick my bones for personal profit.

* * *

With several aliases, including ‘Anthony Thomas’ and ‘James Turner’, JR (as he was known to the few friends he had) was born on Monday, 27 December 1943 in Cicero, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago. Today, standing 5ft 9in tall, weighing 167lb, with green eyes, he is balding with partially grey hair.

Refusing to discuss even his childhood without receiving large sums of money in return (the aforementioned $400,000 to be precise), we know from official sources that he was one of five children to devout Roman Catholic parents who raised him at 4916 West 32nd Street, two blocks north of Cicero’s Sportsman’s Park Race Track. His father, Henry, worked as a machinist for nearby Western Electric’s ‘Hawthorne Works’ manufacturing complex, and, although a nice enough chap, was given to more than the occasional bout of heavy drinking. John’s disciplinarian mother, Alberta, was the backbone of the family and ensured that the couple’s offspring had a decent upbringing. Little else of her is known.

He [Robinson] didn’t talk a great deal, but when he did talk, it was to produce an effect that he wanted. He was shrewd. He was aspiring to more than he was capable of, quite frankly.

Former Eagle Scout public relations officer, Richard

Shotke. Kansas City Star, 2005.

At the age of 13, John became an ‘Eagle Scout’, the highest rank attainable in the programme of the Boy Scouts of America. In 1957, he was chosen as the leader of 120 Scouts who flew to London to appear before Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, at a Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium on 18 November. Therefore, I asked JR if he could tell me a little more about this memorable experience. His reply was:

I have never discussed this with anyone before, and I will not discuss it with you now. This is very valuable information to me. Your British readers would be very interested in my appearing before the Queen. If you send me $500.00 I will give you the exclusive story, which you can sell to the media and make a lot of money.

Three days later I downloaded a press cutting of this Royal Command Performance from the internet, posted it to JR and politely declined his generous offer. I already knew that backstage JR had chatted to Judy Garland and had told British actress Gracie Fields that he planned to study for the priesthood.

With that bit of trivia out of the way, it is known that Robinson was a motivated youngster whose ability didn’t match his drive. He told his peers that he was planning to become a priest and to someday work in Rome, but no one, probably not even John himself, knows whether this was what he truly wanted to do with his life or this was just his way of getting attention. Anyway, maybe the facts speak for themselves: as a freshman at Quigley Preparatory Seminary, in downtown Chicago, he was a lacklustre student and a discipline problem. He did not return to Quigley for his second year of study and it is believed that he was denied admission as a sophomore, due either to his academic or behavioural shortcomings.

After high school, in 1961, Robinson went to the Morton Junior College, in Cicero. He met Nancy Jo Lynch and they married in 1964. After 41 years of domestic purgatory, they divorced on 25 February 2005, this Latter-Day Saint Monica now aware of her philandering husband’s many notable shortcomings, one of which was that he had never done an honest day’s work in his life.

Initially, the Robinsons moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended a trade school to learn the radiology profession. True to form, JR never finished his training but this did not prevent him from getting a job at a children’s hospital where he papered the walls of his office with fake diplomas and certificates. From his lack of skills with the infant patients his colleagues suspected that he was either a fake or one of the most incompetent technicians ever to practise his craft. Although hospital staff remembered him as being a nice enough young man they knew that no way was he a certified technician. Josephine Bermel, who worked with Robinson, said that he simply couldn’t cope with young patients: ‘We had to teach him how to do things properly,’ she said. This downright incompetence cost him his first job. He was just 21 at the time and his wife had recently given birth to their first child.

Undaunted by this setback, and using his phoney diplomas and certificates, JR soon found work as an X-ray technician at a medical practice in Kansas City. Here, he was employed by retired Brigadier General Dr Wallace Harry Graham, who for many years had been the personal White House physician to no less eminent patients than the former US President Harry S Truman and his wife, Elizabeth. Although, as Dr Graham himself told the New York Times Magazine in 1964, ‘The Trumans were healthy. I felt like the country’s most disemployed doctor.’

In the spring of 1944, as a member of the First Hospital Unit of the First Army, Captain (later Colonel) Wallace Graham had waded ashore at ‘Easy Red’ Omaha Beach, four days after D- Day. With the battle raging just a few miles ahead, he treated the wounded in the thick of battle and, by nightfall, his tents, with 400 beds, had taken in close to 900 of the wounded. Moving across France and Belgium, then into Germany, his unit saw some of the war’s bitterest engagements, including the Battle of the Bulge, where he was wounded. He was awarded the Bronze Star, and other decorations, as well as medals from France, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

While in the White House, where he had a ground floor suite of offices filled with the latest in medical technology, he also treated some of the senior staffers, and later became a temporary Major General of the Air Force. He continued to look after the Trumans in their hometown of Independence, Missouri. When the 70-year-old President was rushed to Kansas City Hospital for emergency surgery in 1954, it was Dr Graham who removed his gallbladder and appendix. He had earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. He developed a lifelong interest in botany and also boxed. It seems that the doctor’s only misjudgement throughout his entire, distinguished life was taking on John Robinson.

Quite how Robinson managed to con his way into working for Dr Graham as a lab technician and officer manager is a question for another day, but the doctor was patently no fool. Dr Graham later recalled that he had been impressed with Robinson’s achievements as an Eagle Scout and his ‘extensive credentials’ in radiology. Nevertheless, highly regarded in the community, Dr Graham was a trusting man so he turned out to be an easy mark for a pathological and plausible liar like Robinson.

Soon after taking up his new appointment with Dr Graham, John made a somewhat astute discovery, which developed into an abiding, lifelong attachment to the buoyant pleasures to be had from fleecing almost everyone he came across. The upshot was that he developed the disagreeable technique of making himself wealthy at the expense of others whom he made extremely poor – something the banks have been trying to do for decades. From then on, and to this day, dishonest thoughts occupied every space in John’s head; he pushed honesty completely to the back of his mind.

Robinson started his criminal activities in 1967, but he soon came unstuck when he was placed on probation for three years for embezzling $33,000 from 57-year-old Dr Graham. JR started by stealing and taking liberties in the practice’s medical office. He boasted to friends and colleagues about a house he had bought. In addition, he engaged in sexual liaisons with both office staff and patients – having sex with one patient in the X- ray lab by pretending his wife was terminally ill and unable to satisfy him sexually.

But how did JR find the money to buy the house? The answer is simple; he drained the practice’s bank account to the extent that just six months after he had been taken on, a bewildered and intractably confused Dr Graham was unable to pay Christmas bonuses to his staff. This unexplained loss of revenue prompted an audit of the practice’s books and accusatory fingers all pointed towards Robinson being the culprit. JR was arrested and marched away in handcuffs feigning sincerity and remorse, praying that his hand-wringing, accompanied by an ‘I’m sorry’, would get him nothing more than a slap on the wrist from the criminal justice system. And he was correct.

In 1969 Robinson was convicted of the theft. Because it was his first offence and, pledging restitution, a Jackson County judge exercised leniency, sentencing him to three years probation. Dr Graham never saw a cent of the money JR had stolen from him.

* * *

JR’s next career move was as the manager of a TV rental company. He soon tuned in to stealing merchandise from this employer too. When he was exposed, the company did not prosecute him, but sack him they most certainly did.

Over the next decade Robinson was often in trouble with the police. But despite being on parole for most of this time he still managed to prosper. When asked about his initial meeting with Robinson, one employer said: ‘He gave a very good impression, well dressed, nice-looking… seemed to know a lot, very glib and a good speaker. He defrauded tens of thousands of dollars from various companies to help him along the way.’

Robinson? I wouldn’t leave him alone in my yard to wash my truck. That sumbitch would steal the car, the hose, the faucet, and carry away as much fuckin’ water as he could.

Jeff Tietz, former Kansas City police officer.

Giving credit where credit is due, if John Robinson was anything, he was pathologically persistent and remarkably evasive. For the next twenty years he bounced from job to job, managing to keep out of prison by crossing his fingers and jurisdictional boundaries, and convincing employers not to press charges when he was found out.

In 1977, JR bought a large, waterfront house. It was set in four acres of prime real estate at Pleasant Valley Farms, an affluent and prosperous neighbourhood in Johnson County, Kansas. By now, he and Nancy had four children and it was here, in picturesque, rural surroundings, that the confidence trickster and embezzler formed a company called Hydro-Gro Inc. The firm ostensibly dealt in hydroponics, a method – as any home-grown cannabis enthusiast will know – of growing plants using mineral nutrient solutions, heat and, instead of soil, a hell of a lot of water.

JR’s home-grown publicity literature (a glossy, 64-page brochure) portrayed him as a ‘sought-after lecturer’, ‘author’ and ‘pioneer in hydroponics’. The latter claim would have certainly come as a surprise to the ancients, as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Aztec’s Floating Gardens of Mexico and those of the Chinese are far earlier examples of hydroponic culture. Indeed, Egyptian hieroglyphic records, dating back several hundred years BC, describe the growing of plants in water, so hydroponics is hardly a new method of growing plants. But by the 1970s, it wasn’t just scientists and analysts, many of whom worked for NASA, who were involved in hydroponics. The many virtues of hydroponic growing began to attract traditional farmers and eager hobbyists, but John E Robinson was not, and this will come as no surprise, listed among them.

Hydro-Gro Inc was, of course, a bogus set-up, and in its development he swindled a friend out of $25,000. The man had invested because he hoped to get a better investment return to pay for his dying wife’s medical care.

With his phoney CV in radiography and hydroponics richly embroidered in merit and distinction, this devious Jack-of-all- trades-and-master-of-none managed to engineer his appointment to the board of governors of a workshop for disabled people. He had held this position for little more than two months when this self-proclaimed philanthropist, with an almost religious desire to help the developmentally disabled, was named ‘Man of the Year’ for his work with the handicapped.

Amidst the glare of much publicity, the Kansas City Times proclaimed Robinson’s virtues and, at a special dinner and presentation ceremony, JR was given a grandiose gesture of approbation in the form of a certificate signed by the mayor and a Missouri state senator.

According to Robinson, when he was invited to this dinner he had ‘no idea’ that they would be honouring him. However, feigning surprise when the winner was announced, he humbly accepted what amounted to a rigged award as members of the organisation’s board sat, with their jaws on the floor, in stunned silence. Were the world just, he would have enjoyed universal acclaim, but for various heartbreakingly complicated reasons it was not to be.

A short time later, however, the meritorious award was exposed as having been obtained fraudulently. It had been granted as a result of faked letters of commendation received at City Hall, all written by none other than the ‘Man of the Year’ himself, John E Robinson Sr.

Thing went from bad to worse for JR when the city fathers, whose names he had forged on the letters of recommendation, read about the event in the local press. One man was outraged because on ‘his’ letter supporting Robinson, his name had even been spelt incorrectly. The Kansas City Times, stung by the scam, took its revenge by exposing him two weeks later as a fraud. His children were ridiculed at school and his wife, who says today that her husband had been unfaithful to her for at least twenty years of their marriage, was reluctant to show her face in public. But how did John react? One might have thought that had he had the right ingredients he would have concocted a potion to make himself invisible. The truth, however, was that JR, a fake as genuine as a hooker’s smile, couldn’t have cared less.

* * *

By now the reader will have come to the inescapable conclusion that Mr Robinson is a disagreeable fellow and not a man to trust, least of all the type to enter into any form of agreement with. It came as no surprise to this author when JR penned a letter, dated 20 February 2008, demanding that, ‘Before I enter into any further correspondence with you, I want $400,000, although that amount may be adjusted depending on need. My attorney will control all information and distribution of funds. Don’t blow smoke! I don’t have time for meaningless delays. I will await word from you.’

In 1980 Robinson was given the position of Director of Personnel by another company, and very soon he homed in, like a heat-seeking missile, on his client’s chequebook and money, selflessly using the former to direct quite a lot of the latter into his own bank account. After laundering $40,000 into PSA, a paper company he owned, JR yet again found himself placed on probation, this time for five years.

Between 1969 and 1991, John Robinson was convicted four times for embezzlement and theft, earning himself the notable distinction of being barred for life by the Securities and Exchange Commission from engaging in any kind of investment business. Of course, some of his thefts were minor – he lost his job with the Mobil Corporation for pinching $300 in postage stamps – while others were a tad more significant.

He had no real employment, unless you consider figuring out ways of scamming people out of their money to be real employment.

District Attorney Paul Morrison – Robinson’s murder trial.

Avoiding financial castration by the skin of his teeth, Robinson soldiered on unfettered and undeterred, founding another firm, Equi-Plus, to add to his impressive portfolio. This newcomer to the Robinson stable specialised in ‘management consultancy’, and was very soon engaged by Back Care Systems, a company which ran seminars on the treatment of back pain… and give the company a pain, John surely did.

To keep this brief, Equi-Plus, aka John Robinson, was awarded a contract to prepare a package that included a marketing plan, printed publicity material and promotional videos, which advised the public on how to successfully resolve back pain. However, what Equi-Plus actually provided was a string of inflated, in most cases bogus, invoices and little else. Once again, a criminal investigation was started into the business activities of the energetic JR, who responded by producing a series of faked affidavits, all of which attested to the legitimacy of the invoices submitted to Back Care Systems.

While this investigation continued, this slippery eel founded Equi-II, an Overland Park corporation again run by Robinson who, at the time, described himself as a ‘consultant in medical, agricultural and charitable ventures’. And it was while he was at the helm of this new outfit that he navigated himself into a sphere of activities far more sinister than embezzlement and fraud.

With some $40,000 of stolen funds neatly stashed away, JR acquired an apartment in Olathe, a city south of Kansas City. Here, in this most agreeable of extra-marital climates, he was able to enjoy sexual affairs with at least two women, one of whom is quoted as saying, ‘John kind of swept me off my feet. He treated me like a queen and always had money to take me to nice restaurants and hotels.’

Well done, John, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. Retribution loomed on the horizon for the thieving and libidinous Robinson. The theft of the money resulted in his being convicted and, given his criminal record, this time he faced a possible prison sentence of seven years. However, he escaped with having to spend only a couple of months behind bars and, once more, we find John placed on probation, this time for five years.

John Robinson took away from our family our oldest daughter that we all loved so much. After she disappeared, my wife was a changed woman. A big part of her was ripped away.

William ‘Bill’ Godfrey – Paula’s father in 2003

In 1984, an attractive, dark-haired young woman, named Paula Godfrey, went to work for JR as a sales rep at Equi-II after graduating from Olathe North High School. She was told by her new boss that she was going to be sent to Texas to attend a training course paid for by the company. Robinson collected Paula from her parents’ home in Overland Park to drive her to the airport. Her family never saw her again.

Having heard nothing from their daughter for several days, Paula’s parents became anxious and, eventually, they contacted the Overland PD to report her missing. The police questioned Robinson, but when he professed ignorance of Paula’s whereabouts they went away satisfied with what he had told them.

Not long afterwards, the police located a letter bearing Paula Godfrey’s signature which began: ‘By the time you read this I’ll be long gone. I haven’t decided on Cleveland, Chicago or Denver, oh well.’ In the rest of the letter, Paula seemed to be saying that she was perfectly fine but didn’t want to remain in touch with her family. This neatly folded letter had been found in the bottom of a briefcase belonging to one Irving ‘Irv’ Blattner, an ex-con associate of Robinson, who had been arrested on an entirely unrelated matter. The one-pager was a photocopy and accompanied an original letter from JR addressed to Blattner in an Equi-II business envelope.

After reading the letter, the police closed their investigation, however, Paula Godfrey was to become JR’s first murder victim; the truth of what happened to her would not come out until 2003.

It seems that Paula, an excellent ice skater, had got into some kind of boyfriend trouble, with Robinson assisting by loaning her money. For his part, Irving Blattner helped her find places to stay in Belton, on the Missouri side of the state line, where her boyfriend couldn’t find her. One night, Robinson drove to a Belton motel where the young woman was staying and, for reasons known only to the tight-lipped JR, he hit her in the head with a lamp while Blattner blocked the doorway so she couldn’t escape. Her body has never been found.

Notwithstanding this, in pursuit of his new vocation as a philanthropic helper of young women, JR approached the Truman Medical Center in Independence, a small city in Montgomery County. Here, he spoke to social workers, telling them that he, together with some other local businessmen, had formed ‘Kansas City Outreach’. This, he explained while patronisingly peering over the top of his glasses, was a charitable organisation, which would provide young unmarried mothers with housing and career training, along with a babysitting service. The Truman Medical Center smelled a rat. They refused to help this Patron Saint of Lost Causes, so this ‘Saint Jude’ pitched the same story to Birthright, an organisation which gave help to young pregnant women, who, in turn, pointed him in the direction of Hope House, a refuge for single mums.

According to the writer David McClintick, JR told both organisations that Kansas City Outreach was likely to receive ‘funding from Xerox, IBM and other major corporations’, which would have been news to them. In any event, the great philanthropist asked the social workers to submit candidates whom they felt would be suitable for the KC Outreach programme and, in early January 1985, he was contacted by the Hope House shelter, and put in touch with Lisa Stasi.

At this stage it is worth hitting the pause button and briefly examine JR’s modus operandi around this time. Here we have a pathological liar, convicted fraudster, embezzler, and priapic womaniser who cheated on his wife. Here is a man who has no conscience. A person who will stop at nothing to achieve his own ends; if this meant stealing from the mentally ill and deceiving decent members of the public, then so be it. Now we find him, once again, using bogus organisations to make contact with vulnerable women. He could trawl, with impunity, for young females, and any gullible single mother agencies would unwittingly provide him with his prey.

* * *

Poor, uneducated and unworldly, nineteen-year-old Lisa Stasi was as pretty as a picture and real cute, with long, dark hair, and trusting eyes. With a four-month daughter called Tiffany Lynn, Lisa was homeless and living at the Hope House shelter for single women. Sadly, her marriage to Carl Stasi had fallen apart and he’d left his wife and baby to rejoin the US Navy, at the Great Lakes Naval Base outside Chicago.

Carl later testified that he’d met his wife through a friend. They had married in Huntsville, Alabama, in August 1984, where Lisa had been raised. Lisa was eight months pregnant at the time. ‘We were going to stay there and start our lives there,’ Carl Stasi testified in court, adding, ‘but I didn’t have no insurance and the baby was due and so we came back here [to Kansas].’

Tiffany Lynn was born a few weeks later at the Truman Medical Center, a hospital well known for its care of the indigent. Nevertheless, broke and without a home, the Stasis’ marriage quickly fell apart. ‘It was shaky,’ Carl explained. ‘I was irresponsible and I wasn’t working at the time. It was going downhill from there.’ He and Lisa separated in mid-December, with him returning to the Navy a few days after Christmas.

John Robinson, using the alias ‘John Osborne’, now arrived on the scene. Using his phoney credentials, he offered Lisa free accommodation and career training. He explained to her that this involved helping her to gain her High School Equivalency Diploma, after which he would arrange for her to go to Texas to train as a silkscreen printer. When she had completed her training, he said, there would be job opportunities for her in Chicago, Denver or Kansas City. In the meantime, her new mentor told her, he would not only pay for her accommodation and living expenses but also give her a monthly stipend of $800.

It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. The kindly benefactor took Lisa and Tiffany from the refuge to install them in Room 131, at a Rodeway Inn, a motel in Overland Park, telling her that she and the baby would be travelling to Chicago within a few days.

When JR left the motel, Lisa went to see her sister-in-law, Betty Klinginsmith, to discuss matters with her; she stayed the night. ‘I fed her [Lisa] and the baby. She slept a long time, she took a bubble bath,’ Klinginsmith recalled at Robinson’s trial. The following morning, Wednesday, 9 January 1985, Lisa telephoned the front desk at the Rodeway Inn to learn that an irate ‘Mr Osborne’ was looking for her. She left a message for Osborne with the clerk asking him to call her at Klinginsmith’s home. A few minutes later the phone rang and Betty gave Osborne directions to her house.

He [Robinson] came to my door about 25 minutes later, rang the doorbell. I went down to the door with my son, who was five. […] Lisa put on her coat. He didn’t waste any time on pleasantries. He didn’t say anything to me. He just stood there and looked at me.

After expressing anger that she had checked out of the motel, Robinson insisted that Lisa and her daughter leave with him immediately. There was a heavy snowstorm when Lisa carried Tiffany to his car, which was parked down the street. She left her own damaged yellow Toyota Corolla and many of her belongings behind. Like Paula Godfrey, Lisa Stasi was never seen again by her family.

Back at the motel, later the same day, Mr Osborne produced four sheets of bank notepaper, which he asked Lisa to sign. He also asked for the addresses of her immediate family, saying that as she would be too busy to write letters when she got to Chicago, he would write them for her, just to let her relatives know her whereabouts. Perhaps she resisted, but we do know that she telephoned Betty Klinginsmith.

‘I took it for granted she was at her motel,’ Betty would tell investigators. ‘She was crying real hard, hysterical. She was telling me that “they” said that they was going to take her baby from her, that she was an unfit mom. They wanted her to sign four sheets of blank paper. I said, “Don’t sign nothing, Lisa. Don’t put your name in anything.”’ According to Betty, the last words Lisa said were: ‘Here they come,’ before the phone was disconnected.

According to testimony given years later by JR’s wife, Nancy, he had brought the baby home that night. She recalled that it was, ‘snowing heavily’ and that, ‘the infant was not very clean and smelt badly. There was dirt under the child’s fingernails. Apart from some spare nappies, the baby had only the clothes she was wearing, and some baby food.’

The next morning, the 10th, Betty Klinginsmith telephone the Rodeway Inn, only to discover that Lisa and Tiffany had checked out and that the bill had been settled by a John Robinson, not John Osborne. She reported him to the Overland Park PD and the FBI.

That evening, JR’s brother Don and his wife Helen, who lived in metropolitan Chicago, received an unexpected telephone call from John Robinson. The childless couple had been trying to adopt a baby through traditional placement services for some years, and JR had previously told his brother that he had a contact with a Missouri attorney who handled private adoptions; that for an upfront consultancy fee, of $2,000, he could act as a liaison for Don and Helen. The trusting couple soon handed over the cash, which JR back-pocketed.

That was way back in 1983 and for the next two years Robinson put into place a plan to procure a child for his brother. If the scam was successful, he probably intended to expand it to ‘help’ other childless families realise their dream of adoption. Nevertheless, several times during the following months, Robinson put Don and Helen on notice that an adoption was imminent, but a child never materialised.

John’s crooked scheme required locating pregnant, single women and he knew exactly where to find them. Putting on his civic philanthropist façade, he approached local pregnancy programmes and social workers to alert them to a new programme, Kansas City Outreach, that he and several fanciful leading businessmen ‘from the East Coast’ had created to help single mothers.

Karen Gaddis was a social worker at the Truman Medical Center in the City of Independence, the county seat of Montgomery County, and she had previously met Robinson when he had been seeking referrals in 1984. He was looking for young mothers, preferably white women, who had no close ties to family members. He even showed Gaddis an apartment which he maintained on Troost Avenue, Overland Park. It was a place, he said, where the women would stay.

Gaddis knew Caucasian babies were valued on the adoption black market and, because Robinson couldn’t provide her with any paperwork about the programme, she didn’t refer any women to him. ‘I think he thought we were a real fertile ground for young women that nobody would be looking for,’ Gaddis told NBC’s Dateline when the Robinson story broke. Within days, however, Robinson was at Hope House, where he picked up Lisa Stasi.

A day later John Robinson explained to his brother that a new mother had committed suicide at a woman’s shelter and, for a further cash sum of $3,000 (payable to the imaginary lawyer) and their signatures on a adoption certificate (which was bogus), JR could hand the baby over to them.

On Thursday, 10 January 1985, Don and Helen Robinson flew down to visit Robinson at his Missouri home, where they handed over the $3,000, and were given extremely convincing adoption papers with the forged signatures of a notary, two lawyers and a judge. They were delighted with their new child, whom they named Heather. By now, of course, Lisa had been murdered, probably brutally raped, and it would be fifteen years before Heather’s true identity was revealed, and then in the most shocking circumstances; the man she knew as ‘Uncle John’ would stand in court accused of killing her mother.

Several weeks after Lisa vanished, Betty received the first of the letters that JR had faked. It was dated the day of Lisa’s disappearance, and it immediately raised concerns because she knew that Lisa couldn’t type:

Betty,

Thank you for all your help I really do appreciate it! I have decided to leave Kansas City and try and make a new life for myself and Tiffany. I wrote to Marty and told him to let the bank take the car back, the payments are so far behind that they either want the money or the car. I don’t have the money to pay the bank all the back payments and the car needs a lot of work. When I wrote to Marty about the car I forgot to tell him about the lock box with all my papers in the trunk. Since the accident I couldn’t get the trunk opened. Please tell him to force the trunk and get that box of papers out before the bank gets the car.

Thanks for all your help, but I really need to get away and start a new life for me and Tiffany. She deserves a real mother who takes care of her who works. The people at Hope House and Outreach were really helpful, but I couldn’t keep taking charity from them.

I feel I have to get out on my own and prove that I can handle it myself.

Marty wanted me to go to Alabama to take care of Aunt Evelyn but I can’t. She is so opinionated and hard to get along with right now. I just can’t deal with her. Marty and I fought about it and I know he will try and force me to go to Alabama. I am just not going there.

I will let you know from time to time how I am and what I am doing. Tell Carl that I will write him and let him know where he can get in touch with me.

The second letter typed out by Robinson was posted to Cathy Stackpole at Hope House:

Dear Cathy,

I want to thank you for all your help. I have decided to get away from this area and try to make a life for me and Tiffany. Marty my brother wants me to take care of my aunt but I don’t want to. He is trying to take over my life and I just am not going to let him. I borrowed some money from a friend and Tiffany and I are leaving Kansas City. The people you referred me to were really nice and helped me with everything. I am grateful for everyone’s help.

I wrote to the outreach [sic] people, Carl’s mother and my brother telling them all that I had made the decision to get a fresh start in life. If I stay here they will try and run my life more and more like they are trying to do. I finally realised that I have a baby to take care of and she is my first responsibility. I asked my brother to tell the bank to pick up the car because the tags have expired and I am so far behind with the payments that I could never get them up to date, and with no job the bank wants the car or the money. I will be fine. I know what I want and I am going to go after it. Again thanks for your help and Hope House and thanks for telling me about outreach [sic]. Everyone has been so helpful I owe you a great deal.

At the time that Lisa and Tiffany disappeared, Ann Smith, an employee of Birthright, had somewhat belatedly began to check up on the details that Robinson had provided concerning Kansas City Outreach. They were false. Deeply concerned, she contacted two FBI agents, Thomas Lavin and Jeffery Dancer, who were assigned to investigate JR and they teamed up with his probation officer, Stephen Haymes.

During this period, information emerged that showed that JR was being investigated by Johnson County’s district attorney. Under the glass was Equi-II, in connection with strong allegations that the company had defrauded its client, Back Care Systems. Not only that, but JR and fellow ex-convict, Irvin Blattner (now deceased), were being investigated by the US Secret Service for forgery involving a government cheque. None of this, however, was connected to the disappearance of Paula Godfrey, Lisa Stasi and baby Tiffany, so the trail in this direction was in danger of going cold.

Although everything seemed to point to JR having abducted and murdered two women, despite their own strong suspicions the two FBI investigators and Haymes could do little. Nevertheless, Haymes decided to call Robinson in for a meeting during which the plausible crook confirmed that he was involved in a group called Kansas City Outreach, but as might be expected, he declined to provide Haymes with a list of his ‘colleagues’.

In a second, subsequent interview, Robinson admitted to Haymes that he knew Lisa Stasi, and that he had put her up at the Rodeway Inn, in Overland Park, with her baby. He also said that, ‘she had come to my office on 10 January 1985 with a young man named Bill and told me that she was going off to Colorado to start a new life’.

In a third interview, in March 1985, Robinson told yet another story to Haymes. He claimed that Lisa and the baby had been found in the Kansas City area. Lisa had been babysitting for a young woman, and the woman had contacted his office to see if he had an address for Lisa so she could hire her again. Haymes pounced on this information and demanded the woman’s name and address. JR stormed out of the interview protesting that he was being harangued over the matter; however, a few days later, in the knowledge that his parole could be revoked if he pissed Haymes off, he came up with the details.

The woman, a prostitute called Theresa Williams, made a statement to Haymes claiming that she had, indeed, hired Lisa Stasi as a babysitter, however, when FBI Agent Lavin questioned her more closely, she said that Robinson had made her go along with this false story because she owed him money and he had photographed her nude in order to promote her services as a prostitute.

With the FBI suspecting a violation of the Federal Mann Act (also known colloquially as the ‘White Slave Act’), for possibly transporting Lisa and Tiffany Stasi across state lines, authorities in Missouri and Kansas started looking into JR’s activities on a local level, connected to the disappearance of Paula Godfrey.

With Haymes now suspecting that the embezzler had now turned to abduction and murder, he dug deeper and learned through the prostitute, whom Robinson had photographed naked, that he might be involved in the Kansas City underground sex industry and probably ran a string of hookers specialising in domination and submission sex practices.

With this new angle to pursue, the FBI arranged for a female agent to pose as a prostitute and approach JR on the pretext of looking for work.

According to author David McClintick it was around this time that Robinson developed a taste for sadomasochistic sex, but he also saw its potential to make a lot of money, and very soon he was running a thriving business exploiting this lucrative sector of the sex market. He organised a string of prostitutes to cater for customers who enjoyed S&M. To look after his own carnal appetites, JR employed a male stripper, nicknamed M&M, to find suitable women for him.

The female FBI agent was wired to record any conversation and arranged to meet JR at a restaurant in Overland Park. During lunch, he explained to her that, working as a prostitute for him, she could earn up to $3,000 for a weekend travelling to Denver or Dallas to service wealthy clients. She could also make $1,000 a night just working the Kansas City area. His clients, he said, were drawn mainly from the ranks of doctors, lawyers and judges.

JR went on to explain that, as an S&M prostitute, the young woman would have to allow herself to be subjected to painful treatment, such as having her nipples manipulated with pliers. When they heard this part of the recording of the conversation, the FBI investigation team decided to end the undercover operation out of fear for their agent’s safety, and it is doubtful that the female agent would have been enthusiastic to continue after hearing about that aspect of the job either.

JR had installed the attractive 21-year-old Theresa Williams in his Troost Avenue apartment in April 1985. She had been introduced to JR by M&M as a suitable candidate for prostitution, and having worked at various odd jobs around Kansas City, Theresa jumped at the chance. After photographing her nude and ‘test-driving’ his new acquisition in a motel room, JR initially offered her a position as his mistress. This involved her being given an apartment with all her expenses paid, and for her there was an added attraction; he would keep her well provided with amphetamines and marijuana. She would also be expected to provide sexual services for others, for which she would receive prostitution fees. Theresa took the job, moved into the apartment and, in doing so, became a candidate for JR’s next murder victim.

Haymes’s suspicions that Robinson was running a string of streetwise hookers proved unfounded. And, in hindsight, although a cunning and devious individual, he wasn’t well connected enough to be able to pull off such an unpredictable enterprise. JR liked to be in control of his nefarious schemes. His preference was to be in charge, and a stable of prostitutes, all as equally cunning and more streetwise than the portly ‘businessman’, would have run rings around him. Nevertheless, life for Theresa was not to be a bed of roses.

To start with, he began using her to discredit ex-convict pal, Irvin Blattner, who was cooperating with the authorities over the Back Care Systems and a postal scam. JR ordered Theresa to begin writing a ‘diary’, which he dictated, implicating Blattner in a number of other schemes. He also had her sign blank papers and a draft letter to his attorney giving the lawyer the authority to recover the diary from a safety deposit box in the event she disappeared. Indeed, the last entry in the diary was meant to be the same day that Robinson and Theresa were leaving for the Bahamas – a trip police suspected he was never going to make with her.

Rewinding a little, one night towards the end of April, after being given $1,200 and a new outfit by JR, Theresa was taken, blindfolded in a limousine, to a mansion. There she was introduced to a distinguished-looking man of about 60, who led her down to a basement which was fitted out as a medieval torture chamber. Her host instructed her to remove all her clothes and moments later she found herself being stretched on a rack. Theresa panicked and demanded to be allowed to leave. Blindfolded again, she was driven back to the Troost Avenue apartment. JR reacted angrily to this betrayal, and a few days later she had to refund him the $1,200.

On another occasion, JR took her to task for entertaining a boyfriend at the apartment. However, the worst was yet to come. In late May, he paid her a visit during which he did something that caused her more fear she had ever known in her life. She was asleep when he let himself into the apartment. He burst into the bedroom, dragged her out of bed by her hair and spanked her until she began to scream. After throwing her onto the floor, JR drew a revolver, put it to her head and pulled the trigger. Instead of an explosion, there was only a click – the chamber was empty. By now, Theresa was whimpering with fear, but she went rigid with terror as JR slid the barrel slowly into her vagina. He left it there for several terrifying seconds before withdrawing it, replacing it in its holster and, without another word, stormed out of the apartment.

About a week after the incident with the gun, FBI agents Lavin and Dancer called unannounced at Theresa’s apartment. Having been told that they were investigating the disappearance of two women and that JR was the prime suspect, she decided to reveal the truth. This, of course, involved telling them about the drugs that JR was supplying to her as well as the incident with the gun. When the Feds learned that Theresa had been asked by JR to sign several blank sheets of notepaper, they felt they had reason to believe that her life was in danger, and moved her to a secret location.

Together with Stephen Haymes, the FBI agents filed a report with the Missouri courts outlining details that confirmed Robinson had violated his probation conditions by carrying a firearm and supplying drugs to Theresa Williams. They asked a Judge to revoke JR’s probation and put him where he belonged: behind bars.

In 1987 Robinson started a prison term for his parole violation. He was held until the appeals court overturned the probation revocation order on a technicality: his attorney successfully argued that, because he had not been allowed to confront his accuser, Williams, his constitutional rights had been violated. However his real estate fraud case, in Johnson County, ended with him being sentenced to serve between six and 19 years. He would stay locked up until 1991.

* * *

Around the time that JR was about to enter the correctional system for the first time, police were searching for 27-year-old Catherine Clampitt. Born in Korea, but adopted and raised by the Bales family in Texas, Catherine was a one-time drug user now seeking rehabilitation. JR hired her to work for him at Equi-II in early 1987, but the arrangement fell through. She vanished a few months later. Despite the fact that in various quarters, suspicion of murder once again fell on Robinson, no further action was taken against him.

Much later, in 2003, it emerged that Catherine had lived at several different locations in Cass County, and had started visiting Robinson once or twice a week, usually receiving money in return for sexual favours. Nevertheless, in May or June 1987, she called Robinson and invited him to her apartment. There were two other people at the place when JR turned up, including a person identified only as ‘GT’, and Clampitt demanded money from JR, who started arguing with her. He grabbed a lead-filled baton known as a tyre thumper, and beat her in the head. Robinson instructed ‘GT’ on how to dispose of the body, and the deed was done.

Strangely, like so many so-called ‘intelligent’ serial murderers, JR took to the prison regime at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility like a duck takes to water. Like John Wayne Gacy and Arthur Shawcross, he was the model inmate, making such a good impression on the prison authorities that the parole board set him free. Robertson walked out of prison in January 1991 having served just four years.

However, he still had to go to jail in Missouri for having violated the terms of his probation resulting from the $40,000 fraud he had perpetuated more than a decade earlier. He went back behind bars, serving time at two facilities for a further two years.

It is interesting to read Stephen Haymes’s assessment of Robinson, from a memo that he wrote to a colleague in 1991:

I believe him [Robinson] to be a con man out of control. He leaves in his wake many unanswered questions and missing persons…I have observed Robinson’s sociopathic tendencies, habitual criminal behaviour, inability to tell the truth and scheming to cover his own actions at the expense of others. I was not surprised to see he had a good institution adjustment in Kansas considering that he is personable and friendly to those around him.

While in jail at the Western Missouri Correctional Facility, JR forged a friendship with the prison doctor, William Bonner. He also developed an extra-curricular relationship with Bonner’s vivacious 49-year-old wife, Beverly. She was the prison librarian and JR very soon found that he had a job looking after not only Beverly but also her books.

For her part, Nancy Robinson had found the going tough without her husband’s income. After selling their palatial home at Pleasant Valley Farms, she had to take a job to keep body and soul together. She was fortunate in getting one that provided accommodation: she became the manager of a mobile- home development in Belton. It was to these modest quarters that JR went when he was paroled from prison early in 1993. By now, the two older children had grown up and left home and the twins were at college, so JR and Nancy had the place to themselves. They rented local storage lockers to house their surplus belongings.

Almost as soon as he’d stepped through the door, JR went about restoring the family fortunes. Of course, there was never any real likelihood that he would stay on the straight and narrow for very long and he was soon back to his unctuous ways.

The completely besotted Beverly Jean Bonner had since left her husband and began diverse proceedings. Naturally, she conveniently forgot to mention that, for months on end, she had spent a considerable amount of time lying on her back with her legs akimbo.

The adulteress told William that she was moving abroad and would set up a post office box number where he could send her the alimony cheques. A few months later she moved to Kansas City, where she went to work with JR, who appointed her a director of his company Hydro-Gro. Not long after this grand appointment, Beverly’s alimony cheques were finding their way into an Olathe post office box number used by Robinson.

Beverly Bonner was not seen or heard from again after January 1994. Robinson placed her belongings into the storage locker in Belton, and later, when he was asked about Beverly by the storage facility staff, he said that the woman, whom he described as his sister, was in now Australia. He told them that she was enjoying herself so much that, ‘she’ll probably never come back’.

No one could have ever guessed that Mrs Bonner was actually rotting inside a steel barrel in a locker (E2), next to two other 55-gallon barrels containing the remains of Sheila Dale Faith and her daughter, Debbie, whose government cheques also continued to supplement Robinson’s income.

Subsequently, two of Beverly’s brothers received several letters from her beginning in January 1994. The first one was handwritten. In it, the recently divorced and even-more-recently dead Beverly wrote that she had taken a new job in the human resources department of a large international corporation and would be training in Chicago and then travelling to Europe. In subsequent letters, all typewritten, the deceased woman said her new job was ‘wonderful’, and that she was working with her boss, Jim Redmond.

* * *

Sheila was interested in BDSM and used the internet and personal ads to meet men. She would start talk about BDSM, and I said, ‘I don’t want to hear it. It’s not my thing.’

Nancy Guerrero, close friend of Sheila Faith, 1994.

One of three sisters, 45-year-old Sheila Dale Faith was a widow. Her husband John died of cancer in 1993 and she was left to raise Debbie, their fifteen-year-old daughter. Debbie had been born with spina bifida, had cerebral palsy and she spent her life in a wheelchair, with barely enough strength to manipulate the chair’s joystick controller. Since the death of the patriarch, mother and daughter had lived a lonely life in Fullerton, California. Looking to ‘start over’, they upped sticks and moved to Pueblo, Colorado, in a beat-up white van.

As with so many thousands of lonely women, Sheila began trying to meet a man on the internet and she made a number of bad choices before making the fatal choice of John E Robinson. Sheila told family and friends that she had met her ‘dream man’, John, who had promised to take her on a cruise. He portrayed himself as a wealthy man who would support her, give her a job and pay for Debbie’s therapy.

One night in the summer of 1994, without prior warning, Sheila’s ‘dream man’ called at her home and she and Debbie were whisked away to live in the Kansas City area. As was the case with other women who were befriended by JR, the Faiths were never seen alive again. When they did eventually turn up, they were corpses in barrels.

Both of Sheila’s sisters later received typewritten letters from Sheila and her daughter after their disappearance. ‘She always hand-wrote letters,’ said her sister, Kathy Norman, who received correspondence postmarked Canada and the Netherlands. ‘This isn’t Sheila,’ said another sister, Michelle Fox. ‘It was a happy letter and Sheila wasn’t a happy person.’

The fatal fiscal attraction for JR was that Sheila had been receiving disability benefits from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for herself and Debbie. Now these payments were being directed to a mail centre in Olathe, where JR collected them.

In the autumn of 1994, according to court documents, Robinson filed a medical report to the SAA. In it, not to be diverted from his scheme by the mere technicality of a morbid deception, he wrote that Debbie was totally disabled and would require care for the rest of her life. Under the circumstances, it was not strictly true: she was already dead. The report bore the forged signature of William Bonner, the doctor that JR had befriended in prison and who had, until recently, been Beverly’s husband. When he was eventually questioned on the matter, Dr Bonner categorically denied ever having met Sheila or Debbie Faith, and had certainly never treated them. In any event, JR would continue to collect the Faiths’ disability cheques for almost six years. In July 2000, Cass County prosecutors alleged that, between 1994 and 1997, Robinson defrauded the US government of more than $29,000 in Social Security and disability payments by forging documents to suggest that Sheila and Debbie Faith were alive.

It was also later proven that JR received more than $14,000 in alimony cheques that should have gone to Beverly Bonner. Colleen Davis, the owner of the mail centre from which Robinson retrieved the cheques, told police that she knew JR as James Turner.

If we are to give John any credit, we would have to say that, at the very least, JR was going through a lifetime of psycho- pathologically determined trangressional retro-development with great consistence. In other words – words that John would understand – he was an out-of-control sado-sexual sociopath and spiralling downhill fast. Indeed, at the time of writing he still hasn’t bottomed out, as the following extract from one of his diatribes to the author proves:

You will have seen all the tripe published or on the internet. Eighty percent of which is grossly incorrect, exaggerated fiction with small tid bits of fact thrown in. For example, the moniker given – internet slave master – hype provided by a prosecutor looking for votes and carried through to sell books and enhance TV ratings. According to reports I was an internet stalker who waited in ‘chat rooms’ to locate victims. Great for publicity but factually incorrect and both the police and prosecutors knew it was a fabrication.

John E. Robinson, letter to the author, 10 January 2008.

For the record, JR’s interest in sadomasochistic sex had continued to flourish and he upped the ante by starting to place adverts in the personal columns of the Kansas City newspaper Pitch Weekly. He met and had relationships with a number of women before he fell in with Chloe Elizabeth, who described herself as a ‘businesswoman’ from Topeka, Kansas. She claimed that JR sent her a wealth of publicity material selected to show him in a good light. He included newspaper clippings describing his appearance before the Queen when he was a Boy Scout, his hydroponics brochure, details of his ‘Man of the Year’ award, and a Kansas University brochure containing pictures of two of his children. It was altogether an odd portfolio for someone wishing to engage in a BDSM encounter – the term widely used to describe relationships involving bondage and sadomasochism. Unsurprisingly, JR’s lengthy and distinguished criminal record received no mention whatsoever.

In later years, Chloe Elizabeth described an event that took place during the afternoon of Wednesday, 25 October 1995: ‘I was to meet him at the door of my house wearing only a sheer robe, black mesh thong panties, a matching demi-cup bra, stockings and black high heels. My eyes were to be made up dark and lips red. I was to kneel before him,’ she recounted.

Some red-blooded male readers would find nothing wrong with JR’s request at this point… indeed, there might be thousands of men who would applaud John for his imagination. However, as events would later prove, things would turn sour, for upon his arrival JR took a leather-studded collar from his pocket, placed it around Chloe’s neck and attached a long leash to the collar. After a drink and some small talk, he made her remove all her clothes except for her stockings, and then took from another pocket a ‘Contract for Slavery’ in which she consented to let him use her as a sexual toy in any way he saw fit (it was a template contract he had downloaded from the internet).

‘I read the contract and signed it,’ said Chloe Elizabeth. ‘He asked if I was sure. I said, “yes, very sure”.’

With her signature on the dotted line, he promptly tied her to the bed, whipped her and carried out a variety of imaginative acts on her breasts with ropes and nipple clamps; JR was in his element. Sweating profusely, he concluded their first date by making her perform oral sex on him. The submissive Chloe Elizabeth, it seems, was delighted with her ‘Dom Slave Master’ and he was pretty much delighted with her.

‘That was the first date,’ she later told the judge at Robinson’s trial. ‘It was sensational! […] He had the ability to command, control, to corral someone as strong and aggressive and spirited as I am.’

In any event, before the perspiring and head-to-toe- trembling JR left the house that evening, he told his new slave that she had been stupid for allowing him to do everything he had done to her. ‘I could have killed you,’ he said, with a smirk on his face.

For JR, this master-slave contract with the amply proportioned Chloe Elizabeth had to be about as good as it could get; however, she was not as naïve as he may have thought. Without his knowledge, she had taken the precaution of having a male friend stationed in another room of her house, listening vigilantly, upturned tumbler to the wall, for any sound of excessive behaviour – as if the aforementioned was not excessive enough.

The relationship between JR and Chloe Elizabeth blossomed and they were meeting at least twice a week before it waned as she started to find out that Robinson was not all he claimed to be.

Although this author has no personal experience in such matters, I am reliably informed that it is not unusual in BDSM relationships for the dominant partner to take control of the submissive partner’s assets (as in financial affairs), an arrangement that is sometimes included in the contract drawn up between slave and master. For Chloe Elizabeth’s part, she was required to sign over power of attorney to JR. In return for sex he promised to get her a job in the ‘entertainment industry’, for which he needed publicity photographs and, this will come as no surprise, he demanded her Social Security number. As an obedient submissive, she should have followed his orders explicitly, but she refused, correctly suspecting that he was after her money.

So, if JR had imagined that Chloe Elizabeth’s submissiveness extended beyond her sexual inclinations, he was badly mistaken; she was an intelligent and successful businesswoman, not an ill-educated teenage mother desperate for help and support. Moreover, their relationship was now moving in the wrong direction as she found out more and more about him, and she started to voice her concerns to JR.

Realising that he was coming unstuck, he told her that he was going to Australia and would be away for some time – perhaps a very long time. However, she soon discovered that he had not even left Kansas. When she telephoned his office, the phone was answered but remained utterly silent. About an hour afterwards, her own phone rang and she found herself being berated by a furious JR. He accused her of checking up on him and warned her, in very unpleasant tones, against that sort of behaviour.

The final straw for Chloe Elizabeth was when she found out about JR’s criminal record, and, in February 1996, she ended their relationship.

* * *

It wasn’t long until another woman (her name is omitted for legal reasons) entered into a master-slave contract and struck a deal for financial support with Robinson. She didn’t learn until years later how close she had also come to ending up in a barrel alongside Sheila and Debbie Faith and Beverly Bonner.

JR told this woman that he was divorcing his wife and that’s why he could never stay the night. However, he showered this ‘Ms X’ with gifts and clothes, but she soon noticed that most of the clothes he presented to her appeared unwashed and well worn. When she asked about this, ever the cheapskate Robinson said they were left behind at his office by former employees. Given that most of the clothes were raunchy undergarments leaves us begging the question, what in God’s name was going through her mind?

This notwithstanding, the relationship was going fine until one day Robinson told her to get ready to travel with him. He was going to take her to London on an extended business trip. He told her that she should leave her job and advise friends that she would be gone for some time. She gave up her apartment and Robinson moved her into a local motel. Like those before her, she was told she would be so busy that she should take the time to write letters to her family straight away, as there would be no time while travelling. Robinson said that he would take care of her passport application, as he had friends in the US State Department.

The woman thought it was rather strange as the day came for the pair to leave and JR turned up at the motel with his truck and a trailer loaded with clothing. What further concerned her was that he said that he was going to spend the night in the motel with her.

Nevertheless, excited at the thought of the trip, the woman awoke the next morning at 5am, and roused Robinson. ‘He was like a man possessed,’ she said later. ‘He jumped out of bed yelling at me and barely stopped berating me as he showered and dressed.’ Still angry, JR said that he was going to check her out of the motel and that he had errands to run. He told her that he would meet her at a nearby restaurant, but he never turned up. Confused, and very disappointed, she tried to call him. He refused to take her calls. She persisted. When she finally connected with JR, he said that he was unable to trust her and that the relationship was over. For some reason, he had got cold feet. It wasn’t until Robinson was arrested for murder that the woman realised how close she had come to being killed that day. It is thought that JR had brought his trailer as a means of removing her corpse from the motel and, by rising before he did, she thwarted his plans; the motel had been busy with guests and he would have preferred a quick and silent kill while the woman slumbered.

* * *

In pursuit of his sexual preferences, JR had left the personal ads behind him by now and had enthusiastically embraced the internet. In that same year the Robinsons left the mobile-home park and went to live near Olathe, on the Kansas side of the boarder. The upmarket mobile-home development that they moved to was called Santa Barbara Estates, where once again Nancy worked as estate manager.

Their new address was an immaculate grey-and-white mobile home at 36 Monterey Lane, and here they certainly didn’t opt for inconspicuous anonymity. They erected a statue of St Francis of Assisi in the yard at the front of their home, hung wind chimes over their front door and, at Christmas, earned quite a reputation for their spectacular display of decorations.

As well as their home, which came as part of the perks of Nancy’s job on the Santa Barbara Estates, JR and his wife somehow managed to lease farmland near the small town of La Cygne, south of Olathe. They had about 16 acres that also contained a fishing pond to which JR invited his few friends from time to time. The couple improved the place by parking a mobile home and erecting a shed on the site.

And, it was at 36 Monterey Lane, using no less than five computers and the handle ‘Slavemaster’ – while at once trying to set up a legit wheeling and dealing web site business – he spent a lot of time browsing BDSM websites. Ultimately it would be two of his internet contacts who were instrumental in bringing his world crashing around his ears, but in 1996 that crash was still some years ahead.

* * *

In 1997 Robinson encountered a young Polish-born undergraduate on the internet. Her name was Izabela Lewicka, and the perky lass was studying the fine arts at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Izabela’s parents became very concerned when, in the spring of 1997, she told them she was moving to Kansas, having been offered an internship. She wasn’t forthcoming with the details, doing nothing to allay her parents’ misgivings other than leaving an email and a contact address on Metcalf Avenue in Overland Park.

Her parents, Andrew and Danuta, attempted to talk Izabela, who had just finished her freshman year, out of leaving home. ‘She was past eighteen,’ explained Danuta. ‘She’s protected by law. We could not stop her.’ In June, Izabela packed up her 1987 Pontiac Bonneville with books, clothes and several of her paintings, then left Purdue for Kansas City. Her parents would never see her again.

In August, when it was time for school to start, and after receiving no reply to their letters, the Lewickis grew extremely anxious about their daughter’s welfare, so they drove to Kansas to find out what was the matter. They arrived to find that the address on Metcalf Avenue was simply a mailbox; their daughter didn’t live there. When they asked the manager of the place for Izabela’s forwarding address, he refused to divulge the information. Despite their anxiety, Izabela’s parents did not bother to contact the police but returned to Indiana. Shortly after this Andrew received an email from his daughter:‘What the hell do you want? I will not tolerate your harassment.’ The message went on to insist that in the future they contact her at another address. When he later testified at Robinson’s trial, Andrew said, ‘We exchanged email messages every couple of weeks. In most cases, it was her response to my email messages.’

Izabela was still alive at that time and living a life far removed from the one she had known in Indiana. And she had good reason to keep it a secret from her parents, for her new friend, JR, had provided her with an apartment in south Kansas City, where they enjoyed a BDSM relationship. They even had a slave contract, one which contained more than 100 clauses governing their conduct – she as the slave, he as her master.

In return for her submission, JR maintained Izabela financially, paying all her bills. When she wasn’t engaged in sexual activity with him, Izabela enjoyed the life of a lady of leisure. Her main interest was reading gothic and vampire novels bought from a specialist bookstore, one that she visited frequently in Overland Park. But she didn’t abandon her studies completely, for in the autumn of 1998, using the name Lewicka- Robinson, she enrolled at Johnson County Community College. Her adoption of JR’s name lends weight to reports which concluded that the young woman believed they were going to marry – he being 58 and she 18.

Around Thanksgiving in 1997, Andrew emailed his daughter in Polish saying, ‘I write in Polish because I’m not 100 per cent positive that your letters are coming from you. […] As you know anyone could create an email account and sign it as you. If you would telephone, I would feel much, much better.’

Izabela purportedly replied, insisting that all further contact be in English.’ I have told you I’m happy,’ she wrote. ‘I’m well. I have a wonderful job and a wonderful man in my life who loves me. I want to be left alone. I don’t know how I can make it any clearer.’

At JR’s subsequent trial for Izabela’s murder, a friend of the dead girl testified that Izabela had confided in her that she was going to do secretarial work for an international publishing agent named ‘John’, who was also going to train her to be an S&M dominatrix. Jennifer Hayes also told the court that Izabela was going to begin her sex education as a slave.

In January 1999, JR moved Izabela into another apartment, this one in Olathe. It was closer to his own home, which may account for his sometimes describing her as a graphic designer employed by his new internet company ‘Speciality Publications’. On occasion, however, he is known to have referred to her as his adopted daughter, while at other times he described her as his niece.

Then in August, Izabela Lewicka disappeared and was never heard from again. Police believe that she was killed and disposed of around that time. However, her parents continued to receive emails purportedly from their daughter up until Robinson’s arrest. In the final months, John said that she was always travelling in some exotic land. In one of her last ever emails, she claimed to have just returned from China.

We all finally find what we want and need and I found mine.

Suzette Trouten’s last email to her friend, 2000.

* * *

‘The Slavemaster’ soon returned to the world of sadomasochistic chatrooms. He made contact with Suzette Trouten, a bored 27- year-old licensed nurse from Newport, Michigan, who lived a double life; nurse by day, submissive slave by night. A substantially built young woman with a mass of bubbly brown hair, Suzette, whose non-sexual interests were collecting teapots and doting on her two Pekinese, pursued a highly active BDSM lifestyle, carrying on relationships with as many as four dominants at once.

Suzette had pierced not only her nipples and navel but also five places in and around her genitalia, all to accommodate rings and over devices used in BDSM rituals. A photograph of Suzette, with nails driven through her breasts, had been circulated on the internet and it must have acted like a magnet to JR. Quite understandably, a relationship soon developed. In fact, JR was so enamoured of his new submissive friend that he concocted a very attractive job offer to entice her to fly down from Michigan for an interview. He paid for her flight and when she arrived in Kansas City there was a limousine waiting at the airport to meet her.

The job, JR told her, involved being a companion and nurse to his very rich, elderly father, who travelled a lot but needed constant care. He went on to say that his father did most of his travelling on a yacht and that her duties would involve her sailing with them between California and Hawaii. For this, she would be paid a salary of $60,000 and be provided with an apartment and a car. JR neglected, however, to mention that the only way to have contact with his father would be through the use of an Ouija board or a medium, as the old man had been dead for some ten years. But as we have already established, JR was not a man to let such trivial details inhibit his grand design, so he gave Suzette to understand that the interview had gone well and the job was hers. She returned to Michigan and began putting her affairs in order before relocating to Kansas.

While she was making ready to move, Suzette spoke to her mother, Carolyn, to whom she was very close, telling her all about her new job. In fact she also gave her mother JR’s telephone numbers – giving police a lead to follow when she later disappeared in March. She also discussed the job offer with Lore Remington, an eastern Canadian friend. The two women had met in a chatroom and shared an interest in BDSM. Later Suzette introduced Lore to JR on the internet, and they too developed a long-distance, dominant-submissive, cyber-sex relationship.

In February 2000, Suzette rented a truck, loaded it with her belongings and headed off to her new life in Kansas City. Along with her clothes, books, a collection of teapots, and the two Pekinese, she took with her an array of BDSM accessories, including whips, paddles, handcuffs, various lengths of chains, numerous items made from rubber, and just about anything else that a self-respecting, bona-fide BDSM enthusiast might care to invent. And, on John’s insistence, and although he had no interest in the game, she also purchased two golf balls (brand name undetermined) and a length of elastic, but more this later.

Lenexa is a busy suburb of Kansas City, lying west of Overland Park and north of Olathe, and it was there that Robinson took Suzette when she arrived on Monday, 14 February 2000. He had reserved accommodation for her, specifically Room 216 at the Guesthouse Suites, an extended stay hotel. Claiming that they didn’t allow pets at the hotel, he told her that he had generously arranged for her dogs, Peka and Harry, to be boarded at the kennels of the Ridgeview Animal Hospital in Olathe.

As soon as Suzette had settled in, JR told her to get herself a passport as they would be leaving in a fortnight. He also produced a master/slave contract covering their BDSM activities, which she duly signed. Then, ominously, he got her to attach her signature to 30 sheets of blank paper and to address more than 40 envelopes to relatives and some of her friends. Just as he had done with other women, he told Suzette that he would take care of her correspondence while they were travelling, as she would be too busy to do so herself.

Suzette was the youngest of a family of five children and, according to her mother, Carolyn, ‘was a kind of mama’s girl’. While she was in Kansas, she phoned her mother every day, keeping her informed of how things were going and, although Mom had at first worried that she would be homesick, she seemed to be in good spirits and was certainly happy with her employer, John Robinson. Evidently, he was happy with her too.

On 1 March, Carolyn spoke to her daughter, who was looking forward to her impending yacht cruise with her wealthy boss and his father, and Suzette promised to phone Carolyn regularly before she disappeared. After not having spoken with her daughter for some time, Carolyn made a few discreet enquiries, then she picked up the telephone and called the police.

Detective David Brown began an immediate and thorough investigation of the man he saw as the prime suspect, John Robinson. He obtained JR’s criminal antecedents then contacted the Overland Park Police. The ‘rap sheet’ acquainted him with the reports of other missing women and soon he saw a potential connection. After he had spoken to two other detectives and Stephen Haymes, Robinson’s probation officer in Missouri, it became clear that he could possibly be investigating a serial killer, and a somewhat clumsy one at that.

David Brown instructed the Trouten family and a few of JR’s acquaintances to tape their telephone conversations with him and to give the police copies of any emails that they received from him.

For several weeks after 1 March, Robinson spent time contacting Suzette’s submissive friends and some of her relatives by email, pretending to be her. Most weren’t fooled by the subterfuge. He soon dropped the act and set his sights on Suzette’s Canadian friend, Lore.

Lore and another Canadian woman began their own amateur investigation of the man they believed was named ‘JR Turner’. Robinson moved quickly after Lore told him she was interested in finding a dominant master for a friend. The emails and chat sessions turned to telephone calls, which were picked up by the police wire taps now in place. The Lenexa PD contacted Lore and told her they were investigating Robinson. They did not explain the extent of the probe, but asked her to continue the relationship.

‘The police didn’t tell me to get John Robinson to lure me to Kansas City,’ Lore said later at Robinson’s trial. ‘I was willing to help.’

Robinson made vague offers to Lore about meeting in her person. ‘He offered nothing other than I would be financially taken care of and never have to work,’ she said.

At the time that Suzette had been preparing to move to Kansas, the sexually insatiable JR, using the name James Turner, had established two more BDSM friendships on the internet. The first woman, Vicki, was a psychologist from Texas who had placed an advert on a BDSM site. She had recently lost her job and when JR became aware of this he promised to help her find work in the Kansas City area.

Vicki arrived in Lenexa on 6 April and, while staying at the Guesthouse Suites, spent five days getting to know JR. During this time she signed a slave contract in which she consented to, ‘give my body to him in any way he sees fit’. They also discussed her working for Hydro-Gro before he told her to return home and prepare to move to Kansas City. She was, in many ways, and obvious choice for Robinson… that is to say, she was vulnerable. She suffered from depression and a lack of meaningful companionship and was eager to change her life; she fell completely for Robinson’s ‘bull’. She returned to Kansas City for another long weekend in late April, and it was then that she found that JR was eager to pursue more severe and violent forms of bondage sex than she wanted, but as she believed he was going to find work for her she consented to his demands, allowing him to brutalise her far beyond the limits she had intended.

Vicki later testified that he took photographs of her bound and nude and he hit her hard across the face. ‘I had never been slapped that hard by anybody before’, she later told the court. She also stressed that the photographs were taken against her wishes and despite her protests.

Fortunately for Vicki, the promised move to Kansas never took place. When she demanded the return of her sex toys, worth more than $500, JR chivalrously refused. Moreover, he threatened to publicly reveal the slave contract and the explicit, compromising photographs.

Vicki’s response was to report the matter to the police, and was astonished to learn that all of her phone conversations with JR had been tape-recorded from the outset.

A woman called Jeanne was the second of the two women, and she turned out to be the last one to fall foul of ‘the Slavemaster’. She was an accountant and, after some weeks of preamble on the internet, agreed to become Robinson’s sex slave. In mid-May, she journeyed to Kansas for a few days with JR and was installed in an apartment at the Guesthouse Suites, who, by now, regarded Robinson as an excellent customer.

Later, Jeanne recalled that on Friday, 19 May, she received a phone call from Robinson telling her that he would be coming round to see her. During the call he instructed her that when he arrived she was to be kneeling in the corner of the room completely naked with her hair tied back.

Submissive Jeanne was ready, as instructed, when JR arrived. Yet she wasn’t prepared for what would actually happen. He walked into the room, grabbed her by her hair and flogged her brutally across her breasts and back. Like Vicki before her, Jeanne was discovering that JR was interested in a much rougher relationship than she had anticipated. She, too, didn’t like being photographed during sex, but he insisted on doing so; he seemed excited by recording the marks his beatings made on her body. However, Jeanne’s genuine distaste for that level of treatment must have spoiled his enjoyment, because he told her he didn’t like her attitude and wanted to end their relationship. Her body burning and bruised from the flogging, Jeanne became hysterical to the extent that after JR had left she dressed and made her way in tears to the reception desk. There she asked for the registration card and it was then that she discovered that her host’s name was not James Turner, but one John Robinson. Worried and distraught, she called the Lenexa PD, who, on hearing that JR was involved, gave her complaint the utmost priority.

The detective who arrived at the hotel in response to Jeanne’s call was David Brown, who had been investigating Robinson since the disappearance of Suzette Trouten for more than two months. Convinced that JR was a killer, Brown was not going to risk leaving another woman in the position of becoming a potential victim. When he heard Jeanne’s tearful story, he got her to collect her belongings together and moved her to another hotel.

The next day, Jeanne gave a full statement to Detective Brown. She explained how she had met ‘James Turner’ via the internet, and how she had been invited to Kansas to embark on a master and slave relationship. She told him that Robinson had beaten her with a violence far beyond her desires, explaining that she didn’t go in for pain and punishment or marks on her skin. ‘I’m a submissive, not a masochist,’ she said.

The statements made by Vicki and Jeanne gave police the means to justify the arrest of the man who had been the subject of their investigation into the unexplained disappearances of several women.

* * *

For decades, JR had been baiting traps for other people, killing eight of his victims. But on Friday, 2 June 2000, the traps he had set for his prey ultimately became his own trap. It snapped shut when nine police cars drove up to 36 Monterey Avenue, Santa Barbara Estates, and officers got out, surrounded the building and pounded on his door.

Detectives arrested John E Robinson and charged him with aggravated sexual battery and felony theft; by the end of the following few days he would have willingly have settled for such simple charges. Visibly shocked, JR was handcuffed and driven away to the red brick edifice which is the Johnson County Jail in Olathe, where he was detained on a $5 million bond. At the same time, police and detectives from a number of agencies, including the FBI, spilled from eight other vehicles and began to execute a search warrant for the Robinson home.

Inside, as well as seizing all five of JR’s computers and fax machines, police found a blank sheet of paper which had been signed by Lisa Stasi in January 1985, some fifteen years earlier. Along with this were receipts from the Rodeway Inn, Overland Park, which showed that JR had checked Lisa out on 10 January of that year, the day after she had last been seen alive by the inn’s manager and her mother-in-law. However, those first scraps of evidence were only the tip of a gigantic iceberg of evidence; far more would come to light over the next few days and it would mortify those who found it.

Although somewhat belated, the police investigation had been thorough and revealed all of the property owned or rented by Robinson. Consequently, a second search warrant had been obtained for that morning and, as JR was being driven to jail, detectives were busy rummaging through his storage locker in Olathe. Here, they unearthed a cornucopia of items connecting him to two of the missing women, Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten. They found Trouten’s birth certificate, her Social Security card, several sheets of blank notepaper signed, ‘Love ya, Suzette’, and a slave contract signed by her. Along with Suzette’s things, they located Izabela’s driving licence, some photographs of her, nude and in bondage, a slave contract and several BDSM sex implements. They also located a stun gun and a pillowcase.

The following day, Saturday, 3 June, another search warrant was issued. This time, cops descended on the smallholding that the Robinsons owned near La Cygne. They found two 55- gallon metal barrels near a shed and opened one. Inside was the body of a naked woman, head down and immersed in the fluid produced by decomposition.

After prising the lid off the first barrel, crime scene investigator Harold Hughes turned his attention to the second barrel and opened the lid of that one. Inside he found a pillowcase, which he removed to reveal another body. Again, it was that of a woman, but this one was clothed. Like the first body, it was immersed in the fluid resulting from its own decomposition. Hughes completed the nose-pinching procedures of photographing and fingerprinting the barrels before resealing them and marking them: ‘Unknown 1’ and ‘Unknown 2’.

Later that same day, Stephen Haymes, Robinson’s former probation officer, was told of the discovery of the bodies. After so many years of suspicion, his judgement of JR was vindicated. He later told writer David McClintick, ‘It confirmed what I had always believed, but the move from theory to reality was chilling.’

At the time Haymes was learning of JR’s arrest, the District Attorney for Johnson County, Paul Morrison, was contacting his counterpart in Cass County, across the state line in Missouri, in order to negotiate the issue of yet another search warrant. Detectives had discovered that Robinson maintained a locker at the Stor-Mor-For-Less depot in Raymore, a Missouri suburb of Kansas City. DA Morrison was an influential figure and was given total cooperation in cutting through the red tape inevitable in jurisdictional issues negotiated between two states. Early the next morning, as a result of his discussion, he and a group of detectives from Johnson County arrived at the office of Cass County’s Deputy Prosecutor, Mark Tracy. They carried with them the longest affidavit, in support of a search warrant, that Tracy had ever seen. It asserted that Robinson was believed to have killed several women and that it was suspected that evidence connected with the murders was hidden in the storage locker in Raymore; he had paid to rent his locker with a company cheque, in order to conceal his identity.

We started removing boxes from the front [of Locker E2]. After less than 10 minutes there was a very foul odor that with my past experience I associated with a dead body.

Douglas Borcherding, Overland PD officer.

Shortly after 8am on the Monday, Mark Tracy served the search warrant on the storage depot and the Johnson County detectives were led to Robinson’s locker – effectively a small garage with a brown, lift-up shutter door. Inside was a lot of clutter and the task force spent more than half an hour sifting through it before they saw, hidden at the back, three barrels. Wafting from the barrels emanated the nauseating, unmistakable stench of decomposing flesh.

As it was virtually certain that the barrels contained dead bodies, Tracy summoned his boss, Chris Koster, and the state of Missouri assumed immediate control of the crime scene. A new team of police investigators arrived and the locker was emptied of all its contents, save for the three barrels, which were standing on piles of cat litter; obviously a futile attempt by JR to reduce the smell coming from them.

The first barrel, a black one with the words ‘rendered pork fat’ on the label, was opened by senior criminalist Kevin Winer. The contents revealed a body wrapped in blue-grey duct tape, and a light brown sheet. There was a pair of spectacles and a shoe. When the crime scene technician had removed the sheet, he took hold of the shoe, only to find that the foot was still attached to a leg. On the assumption that the storage depot wasn’t perhaps the best place to investigate the barrels and their contents, it was decided to reseal them and take them to the medical examiner’s office in Kansas City. However, this was not as simple a procedure as it seemed. There was a very real fear that the bottoms of the barrels were corroded and might give way, so a police officer was sent to a nearby Wal-Mart to buy three children’s plastic paddling pools and these were slipped underneath the barrels before they were loaded on to a truck.

Back at the medical examiner’s office, the barrels were opened and, as expected, each contained a severely decomposed female body. Dr Thomas Young determined that they had all been beaten to death with a blunt instrument, probably a hammer, and had been dead for some six years. The body of Sheila Faith also had a fracture on her right forearm that was consistent with a defensive injury.

The first body was fully clothed. The second was wearing only a T-shirt, and in its mouth was a denture which was broken in two. Body three was that of a teenager wearing green trousers and a silver-grey beret. Identification was not immediately possible and would take some days to complete.

Over in Kansas, in Topeka, the two bodies found on the Robinson smallholding were identified by a forensic odontologist as those of Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten.

A few days later, with the help of another forensic odontologist, two of the bodies that had been found at the storage depot were identified. One was Beverly Bonner; the other was Sheila Faith. Soon afterwards, Sheila’s disabled daughter, Debbie, was identified by means of a spinal X-ray, the technology of which, in past years, Robinson had been briefly acquainted with.

The case against Robinson was beginning to assume a structure, although there was the problem of jurisdiction in relation to which state, Kansas or Missouri, would be responsible for each murder. Eventually it was resolved that Robinson would be tried first in Kansas; the date being slated for 14 January 2002, before being postponed until September of the same year.

I was represented by court-appointed attorneys who did NO INVESTIGATION, hired no experts, tested nothing and admitted in open court a day prior to my trial they had not read the discovery.

John E Robinson, letter to the author, 24 January 2008.

I resent the fact that people are now claiming that Mr Robinson, either directly or indirectly, is a serial killer. As each day has passed, the surreal events have built into a narrative that is almost beyond comprehension. While we do not discount the information that has, and continues to come to light, we do not know the person whom we have read and heard about on TV. The John Robinson we know has always been a loving and caring father.

Byron Cerrillo, public defender for Robinson at his trial.

In suggesting that five decomposing bodies found in barrels on two premises rented by his client could never indicate that John was a serial killer, Byron Cerrillo seemed to have watched too many episodes of The Practice – an American legal drama based on the partners and associates at a Boston law firm. Still, with elements of kinky sex and infidelity, the trial was guaranteed to become a sordid affair.

Carolyn Trouten was forced to come to terms with her daughter’s bizarre sex life on the stand and, on 14 October 2002, jurors were subjected to a 40-minute videotape of Trouten and Robinson engaging in sadomasochistic sex. Early in the video, Trouten sat on the bed, looked into the camera, and said to Robinson: ‘This is what you wanted me to tell you…I’m your slave…everything is yours.’ While several jurors covered their eyes, others winced as Robinson was seen to say: ‘The most important thing in life is that you are my slave.’

The jurors were confronted with solid evidence that could only point to JR’s guilt. In counter-argument, the defence team could only say that there was no physical evidence, except a few fingerprints, to link Robinson with anything connected to the bodies.

Indeed, although JR grumbles and complains about the ‘negligence’ of his trial attorneys, he was as guilty as sin. The court heard from Don Robinson who testified about how Tiffany was delivered to him by his brother JR, as well as from the notary public, the judge and two lawyers who said that their signatures on the adoption papers had been forged.

DNA tests linked saliva on the seals of letters sent to Carolyn Trouten by Robinson, to JR. A criminalist gave evidence that Izabela Lewicka’s blood was found in Robinson’s trailer in La Cygne, and on a roll of duct tape of the same type used to bind some of the bodies.

Suzette Trouten’s hair was also found in JR’s trailer, and maids at the motel where she had been staying testified that the amount of blood on the bed sheets in her room was much more than they had ever encountered when cleaning before.

Even Suzette’s prized Pekinese became evidence when a veterinarian testified that Robinson had dropped the two dogs off for boarding. The animals were later abandoned in the mobile home park where JR lived. Dog lovers among the readers will be delighted to learn that ‘Peka’ and ‘Harry’ were later adopted from the humane society.

The pillowcase found in a barrel also formed a solid link between Izabela Lewicka and Robinson. Her mother had given her daughter some distinctive bed linen with a pattern, identical in every single respect to the pillowcase that ended up in the drum containing Izabela’s body. A former lover of Robinson recalled that JR had given her similar sheets, but she didn’t recall there being any pillowcases.

Nancy Robinson talked of her husband’s philandering and how several times she wanted to divorce him, only reconsidering because of the children. Although, at the penalty phase of the trial, JR’s family asked the court to spare his life, when the jury had reached a decision about his punishment the Robinson family put a lot of air under their car’s tyres and were nowhere to be seen.