The Killer Book of Cold Cases (9 page)

The difference between Robinson and other sadists was that he delivered real pain to the women who met with him, not just what could be called play pain. I believe that ultimately, anyone who is into S and M wants to be loved and taken care of like a child, and while some of his women may have recognized how cruel and uncaring Robinson was, they continued to see him. Certainly, they did not stay hooked up with him because he was a matinee idol. Indeed, he was paunchy and unremarkable looking. Some of the women were not into S and M, but Robinson was also a superb con man and willing to say anything to achieve his ends.

Eventually, cops in both Kansas and Missouri started to connect the female disappearances to one person—John Robinson. They knew about a variety of missing women, all with some type of relationship to Robinson.

In 1984, Robinson was in communication with 18-year-old Paula Godfrey of Olathe, Kansas. He talked her into taking a job with him, working in some capacity at one of his nonexistent companies where he promised her the moon. Godfrey told her parents that Robinson was sending her away for training, but when they did not hear anything from her, they filed a missing person’s report.

Eventually, her parents received a typed note—above her signature—that said she was okay. She supposedly also sent a note to the Overland Park police, stating that she was fine and didn’t want to be contacted by them or her parents. Since she was eighteen, the police could do nothing further. They dropped the case, and Paula Godfrey remained missing.

Robinson’s inflated ego is interesting to observe in operation. He assumed that if he sent the note, the cops wouldn’t become suspicious. That was a truly dumb assumption, and only people with delusions of grandeur would think they could get away with something like that.

In 1985, Lisa Stasi, a 19-year-old single mother, met a man calling himself “John Osborne” at a shelter. The man promised her an apartment, job training, a monthly stipend, and even day care for her four-month-old daughter, Tiffany. Stasi agreed, signed a few blank sheets of paper, and promptly disappeared.

A few days after meeting Stasi, Robinson contacted his brother Don and his wife, Helen, and informed them that he had a four-month-old baby girl that they could adopt. He told them that, tragically, the baby’s mother had committed suicide in a hotel room, but his connections with a local charity would allow him to get the child for them if they paid the legal fees, which would be around $8,000 when the baby was delivered. The baby, of course, was Tiffany Stasi, and the papers Robinson brought were all forgeries.

Buoyed by his ability to con people in this way, Robinson subsequently tried to con other young women who had children. He approached a number of homes that housed indigent mothers and tried to convince the people in charge that he was willing to take on the mothers and children, but without the proper official paperwork he got nowhere fast.

In 1987, 27-year-old Catherine Clampitt, moved from Texas to Kansas to work with Robinson, but like others, she disappeared.

In 1993, Robinson was released from a stint in jail where he had met 49-year-old Beverly Bonner. She was a librarian in the corrections system, and he had actually seduced her there. As soon as he got out of prison, Bonner divorced her husband, a prison doctor, and hooked up with Robinson. He killed Bonner shortly after she had all of her alimony checks forwarded to a post-office box. What had happened to her would only be revealed later by the mystified police.

Of all the murders that cops eventually uncovered, the worst by far, at least in the opinion of the author, was that of Sheila Faith and her daughter.

In 1994, Robinson met the 45-year-old from Fullerton, California, who was looking for a man after her husband died. Sheila’s 15-year-old daughter, Debbie, used a wheelchair, was in need of constant medical care, and had hardly enough strength to move the wheelchair on her own. Robinson met Sheila in an online chat room and promised to provide care for both her and her daughter. The Faiths were charmed and moved to Kansas. Sheila received checks from her husband’s pension following his death, and Robinson arranged to have the checks routed to a post-office box. After that, Sheila and Debbie disappeared. Robinson continued to cash the pension checks, though.

In 1999, Robinson offered attractive 21-year-old Izabela Lewicka a job and a bondage relationship. Soon after she moved to Kansas, records show that Robinson paid for a ring and a marriage license that was never picked up. Lewicka emailed family and friends to tell of her marriage, but a few months later she told friends she was going on a trip, and she was not heard from again.

Like other serial killers, John Robinson would have continued to kill if he not made a mistake that proved to the beginning of the end for him. It started when he met healthcare worker Suzette Trouten through the Internet. Robinson told her he wanted to hire her to take care of his elderly father. If she took the job, he told her, he would pay her $60,000 a year and she would get to travel the world with him and his father.

Trouten was just the kind of woman that Robinson was looking for. A nurse by day, she was an abject slave by night, which included having rings in her nipples and vaginal area. She decided to come and meet “JR,” as he called himself then, and then work for him.

In February she left Michigan for Kansas, but before she departed, she left Robinson’s name and number with her mother, Carolyn. Suzette’s mother spoke with her virtually every day by phone, so when she didn’t hear from her daughter, Carolyn reported her missing. Carolyn had become suspicious because typed letters she received, supposedly from Suzette and JR as they traveled Europe, had a Kansas City postmark and were uncharacteristically error free.

Once the police heard about Suzette’s connection to Robinson—who they, of course, had linked to other disappearances and who was at the center of so many missing-persons cases, they decided to pay him a visit. That was in the summer of 2000.

Once they did, the mysteries of a number of the missing women were solved. On Robinson’s farm near La Cygne, Kansas, a task force searching the premises found the decaying bodies of Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten, each in an 85-pound chemical drum. Across the state line in Missouri, other members of the task force searched a storage facility that Robinson had rented and found three similar chemical drums containing the bodies of Beverly Bonner and Sheila and Debbie Faith. All five women, both at the farm and in the storage area, had been murdered in the same way—by one or two blows to the head.

In 2002, Robinson was tried for the murders of Trouten, Lewicka, and the Faiths at the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe, Kansas. He was convicted and sentenced to death. In 2005, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled the capital punishment laws in Kansas unconstitutional. However, in
Kansas v. Marsh
, a 2006 case before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court found otherwise, and the Kansas death-penalty law was reinstated.

Robinson simultaneously faced a complex legal dilemma in Missouri, where prosecutors were actively pursuing additional murder charges based on the evidence discovered in that state. Robinson’s attorneys opposed his extradition because Missouri is far more aggressive on capital punishment than Kansas, which had yet to execute anyone since the death penalty was reinstated. However, Christopher Koster, the Missouri prosecutor, insisted as a condition of any plea bargain that Robinson lead authorities to the bodies of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine Clampitt.

Robinson was in a dilemma. To do so would constitute an outright admission of guilt, which might be used against him in Kansas. Robinson refused, claiming he did not know the locations of the bodies. Koster, on the other hand, faced pressure to make a deal because his case was not technically airtight. (Among other problems, no unequivocal evidence showed that any of the murders had actually occurred in Koster’s jurisdiction.)

As of now, Robinson is on Death Row in Kansas, and if a lot of people have their way, he will be the first person to die in that state via lethal injection.

1. Like John Robinson, I was a con man and a killer, and when I moved to the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago in the late 1890s, pretty young women who came to the area started to go missing.
   
2. I was well aware that many of those pretty young women wanted to work at the Chicago World’s Fair, which was opening in the fall of 1892, and businesses related to it.
   
3. I had arrived in Chicago a few years earlier, and the first thing I did was to start working for a pharmacy in Englewood. The lady I worked for was very grateful because her husband, who had founded and operated the store, was dying of cancer, and when I started to work there, her dreams came true: I handled just about everything and did so well.
   
4. I attracted a lot of new customers to the store, particularly young, pretty women because I was attractive. I was a slim man, perhaps five-foot-eight, with a handsome face and big, liquid blue eyes that few women could look into without getting a strange sensation in their stomach.
   
5. I could cry at will. I had tears in my eyes when, after her husband died, I asked the lady to sell the pharmacy to me. She did, and I repaid her by never paying her for the store, making her life miserable, and murdering her, while telling everyone that she had left Illinois for California and would not be returning.
   
6. I was very good at bilking insurance companies, for example, by stealing a body from a medical lab and then convincing the company that it was someone I had bought insurance for.
   
7. If I couldn’t get the right body, I would murder someone and then alter their appearance by burning or cutting their features so they could pass as the deceased.
   
8. I also engaged in selling “articulated” bodies, skeletonized bodies, to medical laboratories. One person I murdered—who happened to be pregnant at the time with my baby—was a beautiful, six-foot-tall woman named Julia Connor. I got $225 (extra because she was unusually tall) for her body.
   
9. My home was my castle—and my slaughterhouse. It was a sixty-room hotel I designed, and no one else ever saw the plans. It debuted as a hotel for the World’s Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair) in 1893, with some of the building rented out for commerce. The hotel contained all kinds of special rooms where people were gassed, cremated while alive, asphyxiated, and stretched to the breaking point. I could drop the bodies down a chute that led to a room where the bodies were eventually sold to medical schools.
   
10. Police got on to me because of a fake life-insurance scheme involving a man named Benjamin Pitezel who was going to fake his own death, but I murdered him first.
    
11. I was arrested in 1894. Police investigated the castle, and eventually the whole story came out. The authorities pinned twenty-seven murders on me though most people thought that actual number came to more than one hundred.
    
12. Shortly before being hanged, I penned my account of those murders, for which I was paid $7,500. The story was published in the
    Philadelphia Enquirer
    on April 12, 1896. I was hanged on May 7, 1896. I was thirty-five years old.
    

Answer:
I am Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer.