Dead Men Talking (4 page)

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.

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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:

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.

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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: