His victims suffered for a long time before their death
behind the disappearance of a string of young women. Clues that soon lead them to the online world of sex and bondage. It was quite a shock to us, obviously, to find out about these uh websites. There was probably much greater following in this than what we would have ever dreamed. Before long, a growing squad of detectives closes in on the world’s first cyber killer, a man known to some as slave master.
He just developed into this person that could kill people without remorse. Along with police, there are those who chronicle the investigation up close, on film, on paper, and on tape. They are the public’s first witness. Through their eyes, they capture our darkest chapters of crime. In the late 1990s, the internet was growing at an exponential rate.
Within a few years, millions of people were suddenly using their computers to keep in touch with family and friends, meet new acquaintances, even shop or look for a job online. At the time, a young woman from Michigan named Suzette Trouten was among those embracing the new technology. Suzette Trouten was a a gal in her mid-20s.
She was very much into communicating over the internet, very much into emailing, very much into instant messaging. You know, as it was her of course circle of friends. During the day, Suzette works as a nurse’s aide and a cook at a local restaurant. In December of 1999, while at her computer, she gets what seems like an incredible break.
Suzette meets a new friend and potential employer over the internet. John Robinson, or JR as he often goes by while online, lives near Kansas City. He had offered Suzette Troutman a job at $67,000 a year to sort of be a private nurse to his ailing father. For somebody like Suzette Troutman who’d been working as a as an aide in nursing homes in Michigan where she was from, $67,000 a year was a fantastic sum of money that was more than she probably ever be able to make up there.
Although some family members feel the job offer is too good to be true, Suzette feels inclined to accept it. She says goodbye to friends and family and makes the more than 700 mile drive to Kansas. Her two small dogs, Pika and Harry, [clears throat] in tow. John Robinson greets her and sets her up in Lenexa, not far from Kansas City.
For the first few weeks, Suzette stays in close touch with those back home, especially her mother, Carolyn. Suzette had contacted her mother and I believe it was every single day that she was here. She had She would call every day or email every day and there was constant communication. But on March 1st, 2000, that contact suddenly stops.
Carolyn receives no new calls or emails from her daughter and the attempts she makes to contact Suzette bring no replies. They were quite close. When she, you know, the communications line were quickly severed, her mom immediately knew something was wrong. Suzette’s mother contacts John Robinson directly.
He explains that he too hasn’t been in touch with Suzette for several days. He goes on to say that she never actually took the nursing job he offered. Instead, she took off on an extended holiday with a wealthy local lawyer named Jim Turner. Carolyn had never heard Jim Turner before. Suzette had never talked about Jim Jim Turner before.
Suzette would never take off with somebody she had just met like that. That was totally out of character for what Carolyn knew Suzette to be. Shortly after the phone call, Suzette’s mother and other family members begin receiving emails from Suzette again. She seems to confirm John Robinson’s story. With her dogs Pika and Harry still at her side, she explains she is now traveling overseas with her new acquaintance.
The thing that Carolyn and other family members noted about these emails is that they weren’t written the way that Suzette writes. One of the dogs’ names was spelled incorrectly. And so they they knew just from the way she wrote, this is not from her. Along with the suspicious emails, family members also receive typewritten letters from Suzette.
The style of writing was different from her. But yet what was perplexing to them was that her signature was on these letters. They were typewritten, but her signature was on all these letters. And so, they didn’t really know what to think. But her mom was insistent on the fact that something had happened to Suzette and that she really wasn’t traveling with this guy cuz it just didn’t quite fit.
March 25th, 2000. Afraid that something terrible has happened to Suzette, her sister Dawn contacts police in Kansas to file a missing person’s report. When we get a missing person report, it’s so hard to tell what may have actually happened. A lot of times the people don’t want to be found. Um she was out of town.
She could have been in another town at that time. She could have met somebody else. It can be any one of a million different situations. Following up on the report, police visit the hotel where Suzette was originally staying. Suzette was last seen on March 1st, the very day regular communication with her family first dropped off.
The staff at the hotel, said John Robinson, checked Suzette out. And John Robinson was seen coming back in his truck that afternoon removing her belongings. They have video surveillance tape running 24/7. The video tape showing John the day he checked Suzette out of the hotel. The fact that John Robinson was the last person seen with Suzette’s possessions raises police interest.
Furthermore, they can find no record of a wealthy local lawyer named Jim Turner, the man Suzette allegedly ran off with. Back at the station, they uncover more disturbing information. Police records reveal that Suzette’s prospective employer, John Robinson, is actually a career con man with a criminal history involving fraud and theft.
When we look at his life, he had been scamming people since he was a kid. He was very good at it. He was able to talk people into giving him large quantities of money. Of course, they’d never see it again. Most ominous, however, is the fact that John Robinson’s name is also flagged in connection with three other missing persons cases dating back to the 1980s.
We had all these women that spanned back almost 20 years. And the one thing they had in common is they had all had an association with John Robinson. And during that association with John Robinson, they’d all disappeared. The minute that they saw that, they just, you know, had a bad feeling about it that this isn’t this isn’t looking good.
This is another The pattern is continuing. Literally within 24 hours, we had put together a task force that worked out of the Lenexa Police Department that involved several different agencies and within 24 hours we were meeting and coming up with a game plan on what we’re going to do to investigate this guy and and find out what the truth was.
We started talking and since we’re looking for Suzette and we know that Suzette is associated with John Robinson, we say, “Okay, maybe the best way to find Suzette, if she’s alive, is to start surveilling John Robinson. Maybe John Robinson will take us to Suzette. We may get some indication about where she’s at.
” March 29th, 2000. With growing unease about their latest missing person’s case, police begin taking a much closer look at 56-year-old John Robinson. At the time, he lives with his wife Nancy in a local mobile home community. Every day, I would meet group of detectives. We would all be in vehicles that are somewhat low profile.
We dress down in casual clothes. Our detectives would have an eye on his trailer in the trailer park. And when he would start moving, we would follow him. At the same time, police employ another investigative technique known as trashing. We’re just trying to find out what the habits of John Robinson were, seeing if there were any clues of where this missing gal was in his trash.
Um we generally went by there early morning hours. We’ll replace garbage bag that we want with very similar looking garbage bag so that the next morning John or whoever it may be, uh you know, sees it out there and then the trash people take it out. The first time we picked up the trash he’d shredded a lot of the contents of his trash and through the paper shredder.
So, you have these strips of paper that you could try and match up. You can separate by color and you know, if there’s things about the paper that make it unique you can obviously know that goes without but for the most part it’s it’s the big puzzle. And then what we do is we we tape one to the table and then we just try and keep taping pieces to it until we get the full document.
Most of the garbage is quite ordinary with no links to Suzette Trouten. On the surface at least, John Robinson looks like the last person to be involved in a missing person’s case. We didn’t see him doing a lot of things that would raise the suspicion of anyone. He was he was a father, he was a grandfather. We saw him one time pick up his child at a daycare center.
Um we saw him make trips to hardware stores, make trips to restaurants, um with his wife. A lot of the things he did were just ordinary things that ordinary people do every day. But in the days ahead, links to a world of sex and bondage and a mysterious storage locker may lead detectives to 28-year-old Suzette Trouten.
March 31st, 2000. In Johnson County, Kansas, police are looking for missing Suzette Trouten, a nurse’s aide from Michigan. Although there’s no evidence of foul play, the last person known to have seen her is a 56-year-old local resident named John Robinson. A career con man who is linked to at least three other missing persons cases, Robinson is now under constant surveillance.
Police hope he may lead them to Suzette’s whereabouts. We just kind of did everything we could to figure out what where you know where what’s going on and how do we get to the bottom of you know where is this girl? While some officers keep watch on Robinson, other officers go to Michigan to speak with Suzette’s mother Carolyn and compile a detailed list of Suzette’s personal possessions.
We just decided that if a person who moved here and then subsequently was missing if she was gone missing and her property was gone someone would have to put this property somewhere that the only way that you could get rid of that or you would you you need to put it in a storage facility.
So literally we just decided that’s lead we need to look into. So we opened the phone book and just went right down through the phone book calling any any storage facility that we could find. Police don’t find any storage lockers under Suzette Trouten’s name but they do find one belonging to John Robinson in the nearby city of Olathe, Kansas.
Curiously, it appears Robinson visited the site on March 1st the same day Suzette was last seen at her hotel. A similar lead materializes in Robinson’s shredded trash. Officers reassemble a bill for another storage locker in Raymore, Missouri. This one held in John’s wife’s name. Paying a visit police learn that John also has his own storage locker there.
Although police feel the storage lockers may hold clues about Suzette’s whereabouts, they are unable to look inside without solid evidence and a search warrant. We’d actually set up surveillance cameras above the entryways of both storage lockers so that we could keep track of him when he did show up there.
If we were to lose him on our surveillance, we would be able to tell whether or not he went to that locker or not by viewing the tapes once we had the opportunity to do so. At the same time, hoping to find links, police take a closer look at the other missing persons cases that Robinson has been connected to in the past. One dates back to the mid-1980s.
A 19-year-old woman named Lisa Stasi and her 5-month-old baby Tiffany were referred to a program in Kansas aimed at helping young single mothers get back on their feet. At the time, it happened to be run by John Robinson. He had a an apartment that he was using for this program that he was allegedly running for young girls.
But instead of putting Lisa at the site of his program, he put her in a a motel. Her family had received a call from her wanting to know why they were trying to take her baby away. And they said, “We’re not trying to take your baby away.” And she’s crying and she’s hysterical. She’s a young 19-year-old young woman and she says, “They’ve made me sign four blank sheets of paper.
Here they come. I have to go.” And those were the last words that anyone ever heard from Lisa Stasi. The family does, however, receive a signed letter. And basically the letter said, “I’m okay. I’ve I’ve met someone else. I’ve gone off to start a new life. You know, I appreciate the help I’ve received from Robinson, from the organizations that have helped me out, but I’ve just I’m just going to go start a new life.
In the 1980s, probation officer Stephen Haynes met with Robinson to discuss his program for single mothers. He had a long criminal history already by that time. He had embezzled from from employers. He had stolen from from several employers. John just proclaimed his innocence or involvement in any way with Lisa other than helping her out.
She’s gone off with a boyfriend. He doesn’t know why he’s being hassled and and bothered by people questioning him when all he tried to do was something good. Compounding suspicions, Haynes learns that only 6 months prior to Lisa Stasi’s disappearance, an employee of Robinson’s named Paula Godfrey also went missing.
Her family had received similar signed letters. It was to me more than a strange coincidence that you have two missing persons and uh similar circumstance that all of a sudden letters start appearing signed by her saying that I’m okay. I’m fine. I’ve just decided to go off and start a new life. You know, that was more uh coincidence than I was willing to accept.
At the time, Haynes speculated that John Robinson might be involved in a baby smuggling or prostitution ring. Police investigation revealed that he had had a sexual fetish for BDSM, short for bondage, domination, and sadomasochism. BDSM is a rough form of sex that often involves whips and restraints. At least one woman is on record with claims that Robinson hired her out to men who shared similar fetishes.
She also tells us a story that Robinson is involved in a group that provides girls for sadomasochistic sexual relationships. And that he paid her a large sum of money and that he gave her some drugs, blindfolded her, put her in a car, and drove her to a to a house in a in a very affluent part of town. Uh And that she was taken to the basement of this house and in the basement of the house there were uh racks and and other uh S&M type torture devices.
>> >> While a woman named Katherine Clampit would also vanish after meeting Robinson in the 1980s, there was never enough evidence to charge him in connection with any of the missing women. There’s the suspicions but that no actual proof that anything had happened to these women.
No one had any proof there was anything wrong. For police now searching for Suzette Trouten in the year 2000, there are frightening similarities between the old files and her recent disappearance. In particular, the bizarre signed letters, letters that continue to come. She’d write these elaborate letters about, “I’m on the deck this morning.
We’re watching the dolphins swim alongside the boat and our two little dogs, Pika and Harry, are out here barking at the fish.” And and none of these letters made sense to her family because her mom knew that she didn’t like water. They knew this could not be coming from Suzette. Moreover, a grim lead seems to contradict the letters and confirm fears that Suzette never left Kansas.
Officers learn that two dogs matching the description of Pika and Harry were recently picked up by a local animal shelter. To make a comparison, officers use photos of the dogs provided by Suzette’s mother, Carolyn. Carolyn tells me that those two dogs, Pika and Harry, were were her kids. Uh Suzette would go nowhere without Pika and Harry, and she says, “If you find Pika and Harry without Suzette, she knows something is seriously wrong.
” One dog has been given up for adoption to a local family. I went to their house and I told them why I was there and they were very helpful, very friendly. I talked to him for a while. I looked at the dog. I showed him the picture. They agreed it looked like this dog, Pika. And then, after I talked to him for a while, I called the dog by name and it came right over to me.
So, we just all we knew then that was that was Pika. Suzette’s other dog, Harry, turns up at another shelter. I flew up to to Michigan and I met with Carolyn at her house and delivered the news to Carolyn that, you know, we had found Pika and Harry and described the circumstances. And that that hit home pretty hard, you could tell.
Uh Carolyn, you know, sat back and said, “Then that means uh Suzette’s probably dead.” So, she realized at that point that it was very the chances of Suzette being found alive were slim to none. It became very, very obvious to us that this guy was probably killing women. But without enough evidence against Robinson for an arrest warrant, police can do little more than watch and wait.
New answers will soon come from the internet and from a stream of new women that John Robinson starts bringing into town. April 2000. Police in Kansas are keeping a constant watch on 56-year-old John Robinson. Although they have no evidence against him, he is the prime suspect in the disappearance of at least four young women.
Most recently, a 28-year-old nurse’s aide named Suzette Trouten. We never really had solid information that any other thing other than the fact that she’s missing. We don’t know where she is. We knew she was with this guy and we don’t know what he may have done with her. She might be alive, she might be dead.
Police tailing Robinson learn that along with keeping storage lockers in the area, he also has a hideout far from the mobile home community he lives in with his wife. On one occasion, Mr. Robinson was followed and he’d been going for quite a ways down south and he eventually ended up in La Cygne, Kansas which and it was quite a ways to travel and they saw him drive onto a property.
It’s just a property that had a small pond on it. Had a trailer on it at the end of the long driveway. We didn’t know what was inside of there but we knew that since he did visit it, we believed that to be a possible location for whatever happened to Suzette Trouten. There was a fairly significant period of time where we had our suspicions and we had real strong beliefs about what was going on. We couldn’t prove it.
But in the interim, we had to build our case and make sure that he didn’t kill anybody while we were watching him. Some feel the strongest leads to date rest in the various letters received by Suzette’s family. The one supposedly written by their missing daughter. To to trace mail letter correspondence, you take a look at the the postmark you know on on the envelope.
That’s going to tell you the the city and the state of origin. There’s also some codes in there that’ll help you identify, you know, the originating post box or the original post office. Curiously, the postmarks all correspond to the distant locations Suzette claims to be in. At the very least, someone is dropping them off at post offices a long way from Johnson County, Kansas.
The trick was, you know, figuring out where they were coming from. It isn’t long, however, before detectives make a striking breakthrough regarding Suzette’s suspicious emails. They piece together bills in the trash that provide details about John Robinson’s internet service provider. Police realize that as of March 1st, the very day Suzette’s regular communication dropped off, all new emails allegedly from her actually emanated from John Robinson’s account at his residence.
We knew that John was accessing Suzette’s internet account from his residence. John Robinson was one sending these fictitious emails. Robinson’s online activity also reveals access to internet sites related to BDSM, a long-standing fetish of his, where he occasionally uses the nickname Midwest Master. It was quite a shock to us, obviously, to find out about these uh websites.
It’s a master, slave, bondage, and discipline sex acts, and it involves uh props and contracts and uh sexual activity. Police learn that missing Suzette Trouden was also interested in the BDSM lifestyle. Police wonder if her disappearance may somehow be related to a criminal strain of this online subculture. There were discussions about sex slaves and about uh people being kidnapped and and taken into sex slavery.
And in the back of our minds, we’re wondering, okay, is that something we’re into here? Are we into, you know, a a sle- a sex slave ring? Could anyone else be uh involved in you know, harboring Suzette in kidnapping and in in in chasing her away or or take her away to be a sex slave somewhere. Certainly with the the BDSM aspects of it and that was a very real possibility.
The fact that Robinson has clearly accessed Suzette Trouten’s email account could provide police with a search warrant for his home, but not for his storage lockers or his farm, the most likely places to hide incriminating evidence. When you reach a point to you know, you still don’t know for sure if Suzette’s alive.
You still don’t know for sure who may or may not be involved. You reach a a point where to try to identify co-conspirators, you monitor telephone conversations. Within days, there is a sudden new development. Police tracking numbers dialed from Robinson’s cell phone realize he is contacting women living in different states and arranging travel plans to Kansas.
Through his online persona, it appears John Robinson, aka Midwest Master, is about to bring more women into town. He would contact them, try to see if they were interested in coming down here. He held himself out as some kind of a master, if you will, in bondage and discipline and would offer to train these women and ask them to be a slave.
His online tactics bear a strong similarity to those that brought Suzette Trouten to Kansas a few months earlier. But he would add a flavor to that by telling them that he was a very very rich either divorced or widowed businessman. They had all these connections and that he would set them up with a job here uh and take care of them.
In the days ahead, police will get their closest look yet at the underground world of BDSM and meet a woman who barely escaped becoming a missing person herself. April 2000 in Kansas, police are investigating the case of missing Suzette Trouten, a 25-year-old woman from Michigan. Prime suspect is local resident John Robinson, heavily involved in the bondage and S&M subculture.
Police watch as he actively sets up sexually related meetings with new acquaintances from out of town. April 24th a young woman named Vicky from Texas arrives in Overland Park, Kansas and checks into a local motel room reserved by Robinson. Uh Vicky was another woman that uh you know, he was he had met online.
Uh Vicky had had come in to be part of the uh uh BDSM lifestyle with him. She had uh what I guess what we refer to as her own bag of tricks. You know, BDSM involves different toys, uh tools, things like that. She had brought some of that along with her. Police watch as John Robinson arrives at the motel and heads up to the room.
Soon after, Vicky approaches the front desk clerk and asks if she can have a photocopy made. The clerk, aware of police surveillance, makes an extra copy of the document and hands it over to undercover officers on the premises. It turns out to be a detailed slave-master contract popular in BDSM circles. In the BDSM world, uh oftentimes these people would come up with these elaborate contracts about the conditions of the contract to be somebody’s slave and somebody’s master.
Of course, John Robinson being the control freak that he is, it was always the master. And a lot of these people that are into BDSM are uh really into sort of the the the whole scene setting, if you will, of uh somebody being in control and somebody being dominated. And um uh I think a lot of the people kind of got off just on the contracts.
Hoping to ensure Vicki’s safety without giving up their cover, officers quietly take up positions in adjacent rooms. The officers that were on the scene had to make decisions about this person that he’s meeting isn’t our missing girl. But we also need to find this missing girl.
And is this woman who’s meeting him safe? Can we uh can we indeed in that room with him? Officers hear frequent noise, but they have to distinguish between the normal violence that often goes along with BDSM activities and a potential real threat. You’d have officers in the next room listening. And sometimes there’d be hitting and a lot of hollering going on.
Uh and we’re trying to discern whether or not that’s consensual play kind of stuff or if he’s really hurting these women. And so there were a lot of difficulties involved uh in that investigation. After 3 days, Vicki, apparently unharmed, heads home for Texas. Other women soon take her place. He’d be going to hotels, meeting with women, emailing people, so on and so forth.
And as soon as he would get as soon as his wife would get home at about 5:00 in the afternoon, Robinson would come home, and he’d be the husband and the grandpa to his grandkids, and just a normal acting guy. Um uh except for a 9:00 to 5:00 during the work days. Police surveillance is constant, but on one brief occasion, Robinson slips away while driving across town.
Uh we we lost sight of him. We we couldn’t pick him back up again. And we eventually found him back at his residence. Only later, while routinely reviewing tapes back at the station, are they able to fill in the missing gap. We were able to tell by viewing some surveillance footage at a storage locker that during that time frame he had paid a visit to that storage locker.
And we just happened to see him walk into the storage locker holding a bag. It just looked like a black soft-sided bag, um briefcase size, maybe a little thicker than that. And when he walked out of the storage locker, he did not have it with him. While some believe the black bag possibly contained sex toys, others speculate it may also contain potential murder weapons.
Well, there was an almost daily debate on when to arrest him. Um you have to understand, you know, it’s easy to arrest somebody, but when you arrest somebody, you need to be able to have a case you can prove in court. May 19th, 2000, a woman named Gina arrives in town to meet with Robinson. Within hours, there appears to be a falling out.
John leaves Gina. And uh Gina begins to become concerned about the circumstances that she’s placed herself in. In a striking development, Gina approaches the front desk of the hotel. After speaking with the staff, she asks them to phone the police. The call is promptly routed to officers in charge of the surveillance.
Gina tells police she is worried because the man she came to town to meet had sexually assaulted her and used a false name, something she discovered from the hotel staff. The name he originally gave her is Jim Turner, the same name Robinson gave Suzette Trouton’s family to identify the mystery man she’d apparently run off with.
As police have long suspected, Jim Turner and John Robinson are one and the same person. Not long after police moved Gina to a safe location, the woman known as Vicky also contacts them. She reports that John Robinson has stolen her sex toys and refuses to return them. Within a matter of days, two women have provided police with all the probable cause they need to move in and search Robinson’s various properties.
They went to the police independently of each other and reported him for theft and aggravated sexual battery. So, it was a big, big break in the case for us, just at a time when we needed the most. June 1st, 2000. Police take up positions around John Robinson’s mobile home community. Shortly after his wife leaves for the day, they decide to make their move.
He was contacted at his mobile home that morning and two detectives went up and talked to him and and they actually went in the trailer and he they eventually got around to the, you know, telling him they needed to talk to him about some crimes and he they told him these what the crimes were, what he was going to be arrested for.
The charges relate to Gina and Vicky and include aggravated sexual battery and theft. Robinson seems embarrassed and plays down the incidents, but the mood in the room changes when the detectives bring up the cases of the four missing women, Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, Katherine Clampit and Suzette Trouton.
When those names were mentioned, you could tell that John Robinson knew exactly what was coming his way. He lost the coloration in his face. He appeared to be speechless. And he had a look of great concern on his face. Robinson is handcuffed and taken to the station. Hoping to get a confession, police place him in an interrogation room filled with photos related to their investigation.
Yeah, the the room was set up in a manner that everywhere you looked you saw John Robinson’s life right there, you know, as we knew it from our criminal investigation. He would know without any doubt, beyond any doubt at all, that the gig was up, that he’s, you know, he’s had, that there were no secrets. After taking it all in, Robinson asks for a lawyer.
Without a confession, police need to turn up concrete evidence on Robinson’s properties. The truth, it turns out, is far worse than they ever imagined. June 1st, 2000. Police in Kansas have arrested local resident John Robinson. Although he denies any wrongdoing, he is the prime suspect in the disappearance of Suzette Trouten and three women from the 1980s.
Hoping to finally get the answers they’ve been looking for, police execute his properties, starting with the mobile home he lives in with his wife. He did use several identities when he was speaking to these women. In fact, we’d found paperwork in his residence to show that he was portraying people involved with the DEA, CIA, and he had paperwork where he could photocopy and type up his name and and make people believe that he was actually part of those organizations.
Other details of Robinson’s secret life turn up in the storage locker he keeps in an adjacent city. Inside, police find a black duffel bag he often carried around with him. While it holds nothing but sex toys, other nearby cases are far more incriminating. And we found in that storage locker literally a treasure trove of evidence.
Some of missing Suzette Trouten’s personal effects turn up, including her ID. Police also find envelopes addressed to her family and sheets of paper, blank except for Suzette’s signature pre-signed at the bottom. Even more disturbing, police find ID belonging to other women currently unknown to the investigation.
Although police now have hard evidence connecting John Robinson to Suzette’s possessions, they still have no idea of her whereabouts. The following day, a large team of investigators moves in on his rural farm. We had a search warrant for the for the property. We had a really good size force of detectives there.
We’re making our way across this property using search patterns looking for bodies. Um I was in charge of filming the site, videotaping the process. The terrain was kind of hilly, so it took us quite a while. We looked all through this property. We were just combing across the property and uh Sergeant Roth uh had discovered these barrels.
Sergeant Roth rolled the first one out and uh when we stood it back up, the I can remember this day, there was a a thin line of a red that that ran down from the the lip. Flies from nowhere just appeared and landed on this red liquid. And you know, it was we clearly knew then that we had something very important in that barrel.
An officer from the crime lab is called over to remove the lid. Inside, police find decomposing human remains. You know, we all kind of stood there for a minute. You know, it’s kind of a shock. We think that’s her. But, it’s someone. It’s a dead body. We know that. Uh whether it’s Suzette or not, we didn’t But, we clearly knew then this is we’re on. This is it.
Moments later, police find another body inside a second barrel. Two days later, at John Robinson’s storage locker in Missouri, across the state line, another three bodies are recovered, also sealed up in barrels. News of the grim discovery spreads quickly to the local media. There is a lot of gossip among the media and and the law enforcement say this is this is getting bigger and bigger each day.
Then, when they went to the scene and basically found the barrels, I mean you talk about an immediate frenzy, it was there. I mean no one expected bodies rotting in barrels. Then, you go across the state line, you find three more. Then, it’s you know, they here in Kansas City, Johnson County this is happening.
Over the next several days, forensic experts compile further evidence tying John Robinson to the crime scenes. I actually spent 4 days at the crime scene. And my primary role was to process the crime scene for the development of latent prints. There were a total of 11 latent print cards that were lifted at the scene.
All the latents of value did identify to John Robinson. At the same time, dental records help put names on the victims. One of the women found on John Robinson’s farm is positively identified as missing Suzette Trouten. The others confirmed to be one Isabella Lewicka, a 21-year-old from Indiana who was last seen in 1999.
The three bodies in Missouri are identified as Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, and Sheila’s daughter Debbie Faith, none of whom were ever reported missing or associated in the earlier investigation into John Robinson. One of his patterns was to pick up women and hook up with women that in many many ways were desperate.
He got his hooks in them by basically promising them that he was going to help them make it. He was going to get them a good job. He was going to get them job training, that kind of a thing. And they would tell friends typically or family that they were getting ready to go out of town. They’d never be seen again. He would convince them to sign blank letters.
So, they didn’t realize, you know, what he had going in his mind. They didn’t realize that they were, you know, helping him make them disappear, but that is what they were doing. While the bodies of missing women Katherine Clampitt, Paula Godfrey, and Lisa Stasi don’t turn up in searches of Robinson’s property, further investigation makes a startling discovery.
John Robinson’s own brother adopted Lisa Stasi’s daughter Tiffany, only 5 months old when she went missing with her mother. By forging adoption papers and charging his brother thousands of dollars for what he thought was a legitimate adoption, Robinson may have been motivated by nothing more than the chance of making a small profit.
There are pictures that evening. John Robinson sitting there with the family bouncing Lisa Stasi’s young baby on his knee, grinning like a Cheshire cat in there. And we always theorized that that was probably just literally hours after he had killed Lisa Stasi, that baby’s mother. People like Robinson are sociopaths.
This somebody who really lacks the capacity to feel real emotion. Uh and he literally was living a double life. Uh on the one hand, he was a husband and a grandfather and uh on the other hand, he was a serial killer. I don’t know what makes a guy like that tick, why he did the the evil things that he did. He just developed into this person that could kill people without remorse.
In October of 2002, John Robinson stands trial in Kansas, charged with capital murder in the cases of Suzette Trouten and Isabella Lewicka. He is also charged with first-degree murder in the case of Lisa Stasi, whose body was never found. Outstanding charges in Missouri involved the murders of Beverly Bonner and Sheila and Debbie Faith.
With Robinson dubbed the world’s first cyber killer and often referred to as slavemaster in the press, the entire state is gripped by the proceedings. You know, Johnson County at most maybe have like one or two murders a year. You know, something like this where bodies are being barrels, this doesn’t happen in the neck of the woods.
Facing a mountain of evidence, Robinson is eventually found guilty on all charges and sentenced to death. Although the bodies of Lisa Stasi, Catherine Clampitt, and Paula Godfrey were never located, the fact that Robinson will pay the ultimate price for his crimes provides at least some comfort to the families of the many victims.
I felt relieved that all the work that we through that it came down to that. I’m relieved for the families knowing that they could gain some sort of closure. Today, John Robinson remains on death row in Kansas awaiting his punishment. Sadly, the legacy of his life of violence will live on long after he is gone.
The number of lives that, you know, Robinson has destroyed is is unbelievable. Uh you know, obviously the the victims and their families, he’s impacted hundreds of other people just by his his thefts and crimes and lies. I think the moral of the story is um how dangerous the internet can be. Um the internet brings us a lot of good things, but there is a definite dark side to that.
Um that exhibited itself in this case by what happened to these women. And you guys like John Robinson that sort of come out of nowhere and promise the world to people um there’s an ulterior motive and um often times there’s a real dark side to what’s going on. And he was an expert at offering hope to the hopeless.
And lure them in just like a spider into a um you know, lure a moth to a web. And once they got here, for a lot of them, it was the end.
