Dead Men Talking (7 page)

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.

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.

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.

Nancy divorced her husband on 25 February 2005, and wants nothing more to do with him, further exposing Robinson as a pathological liar. In a letter to the author dated 10 January 2008, he writes: ‘My family worked for two years to put together a team which included every possible requirement from data-base set-up to forensic testing, most volunteers. Unfortunately the actual cost budget put together was $2.5 million dollars, an impossible amount.’

*    *    *

In January 2003, Judge John Anderson III sentenced Robinson to death twice and handed down a life sentence for the killing of Lisa Stasi.

With John Robinson now on Death Row in Kansas, the state of Missouri were still pursuing the three murders that had been committed within their jurisdiction. For his part, JR was more worried about being extradited to stand trial in Missouri, because that state was much more aggressive in using capital punishment than Kansas. However, in point of fact, Kansas has not executed anyone since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, so JR’s fears were groundless.

Despite Robinson’s argument that his attorneys were all but useless, they had negotiated tirelessly with Chris Koster, the Missouri prosecutor, who stood firm against their offers and tried to get Robinson to lead investigators to the bodies of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey and Catherine Clampitt.

Either because he could not, or would not reveal where he had dumped the bodies, Robinson demurred until Koster and his team became convinced the women’s remains would never be found. Only then did Koster, with the permission of the victims’ families, agree to accept the guilty pleas in return for life without parole sentences. JR would never be executed in Missouri.

In mid-October 2003, JR, looking much older than his 59 years, stood before a Missouri judge and, in a carefully scripted plea, acknowledged that the prosecutor had enough evidence to convict him of capital murder for the deaths of Godfrey, Clampitt, Bonner and the Faiths. He demanded the unusual plea agreement because an admission of guilt in Missouri might have been used against him in Kansas – Kansas prosecutor Paul Morrison said he wasn’t convinced the murders actually occurred in Koster’s jurisdiction – and nothing he said in Cass County, Missouri, resembled anything like a confession of guilt.

Once again, JR gave no statement or even a hint of what prompted his homicidal acts. As the victims’ next of kin shared their feelings of anger and pain before his sentencing to life in prison in Missouri, he ignored them and stared straight ahead, oblivious to the hurt he had wrought. His mind unable to empathise with them, Robinson appeared bored with the entire process. In this, the final time he was ever likely to appear in public, it was clear that the depth of their emotions were something he had never experienced, and cared not a jot about.

Amazingly, some good news followed: on 6 July 2000, authorities located Lisa Stasi’s daughter, Tiffany, alive and living with Robinson’s older brother, Don, in Hammond, Indiana. Unaware that the adoption was not legal or that the girl’s mother had disappeared and presumably been murdered by Robinson, whom the child knew as ‘Uncle John’, Don and his wife raised the little girl in a normal, loving fashion. At the time of writing, Tiffany is 23. She has been made aware of the true identity and fate of her mother and has since met her biological father.

*    *    *

The deal I offered JR was that he could write what he wanted to say in this chapter, in fact my brief was that he could have his own book if he agreed. This was his chance, perhaps his one and only chance, to come clean, to atone for his dreadful crimes and, more importantly, put the minds of his victims’ families to rest and give them some form of closure.

I also offered JR the opportunity to be interviewed by one of the UK’s leading top end television producers of documentaries, on camera, to say what he needed to say, to clear the slate as he saw fit.

I have tried this approach more than fifteen times over the years, and have succeeded with thirteen of America’s most notorious serial murders. In doing so, I have cleared up a number of homicides and other serious related offences. My books
Talking with Serial Killers I
and
II
testify to this success, as does my TV documentary series,
The Serial Killers
, which is still being screened, over two decades after the series first appeared on our TV screens.