World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (27 page)

The next victim was Paula Godfrey, a teenager from Olathe, Kansas. Robinson ‘owned’ a string of companies that were little more than pieces of paper; Robinson said he could offer her a job in one of them, and taking him at his word, the young woman accepted. When she left her home in 1984, she explained to her parents that she was being sent away for training, and that she might be out of touch for a while. But as the weeks turned into months her family grew worried and approached police. Soon after filing a missing persons report, the Overland Park Police Department received a typed letter with Paula’s signature at the bottom, explaining that she was healthy and happy, but did not want to see her family again. That was the last anybody heard of her. To this day, her remains have not been found.

The typed letter was to become something of a motif in these disappearances. They were used after the murder of Lisa Stasi, and again with Catherine Clampitt, twenty-seven, who also disappeared after moving to Overland Park to work in one of Robinson’s fake business in 1987. In 1993, Beverley Bonner, a prison librarian who Robinson had managed to seduce while in prison divorced her husband and moved to Kansas City, ostensibly to work for John Robinson. She was last seen alive in January 1994, although after a few more typed letters her killer was still able to collect her monthly alimony from a mail box in Olathe. In the following months Robinson would lure widow Sheila Faith, forty-five, and her fifteen-year-old wheelchair-bound daughter Debbie, from their home in Puebla, Colorado to Kansas. The two disappeared shortly after arriving, but Robinson would continue to collect Debbie’s disability benefit until the day he was arrested.

Next, there was the 21-year-old Polish immigrant Izabela Lewicka, of West Lafayette, Indiana. Although she may have initially believed Robinson’s claims about helping her career, he had by this time developed a penchant for master-slave sexual relationships, and Izabela was happy to indulge him in this. She signed a contract detailing the manner of her subjugation. She kept him amused for two years before Robinson grew bored and murdered her.

He then turned to Suzette Trouten, a nurse’s aide who also indulged in alternative sexual practices. They had met on the internet, on various bondage/sadomasochist sites Robinson visited, where he was known as ‘The Slavemaster’. He offered her sixty thousand dollars to come down and look after his ailing father.

The Ones That Got Away

Police had had their suspicions about John Robinson for a long time. His name was cropping up far too often on missing persons’ reports. But in each case he had been careful to plant a story that would explain their disappearance, even arranging to have typed letters sent from other states and countries. In the absence of any dead bodies, they had to let the matter lie. For the families of the victims, this case had definitely gone cold. But in 2000 the police realized they had the opportunity to press their investigation further.

They were helped significantly by Lore Remington, a friend of Suzette Trouten whom Robinson moved in on after murdering the Canadian nurse. Lore, worried about her friend’s disappearance, decided to indulge him from a distance. Suzette’s mother had already filed a report with the police, who were ready to tap into any phone calls between the pair. They asked Lore to continue her relationship with him so as to help their investigation, and she did so, playing him for the sake of her missing friend. The police began to covertly monitor Robinson’s activities, and were shocked to discover the extent of his depravity. On the other side of thin walls in cheap motels, officers would have to listen to violent and abusive but apparently consensual sex. The surveillance lasted for two months, as Robinson’s psychosis worsened and he grew more dangerous. Eventually, two women pressed charges for assault. The authorities used their evidence to secure a warrant to arrest Robinson and search his property.

Endgame

When police visited the killer at his family home they came straight out and confronted him with the full range of their suspicions, naming names that went back over twenty years. For once the silver-tongued fraudster fell silent. All that was needed was a thorough search of Robinson’s property. In a remote, run-down ranch they found two sealed barrels containing the remains of Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten. In a storage facility in Raymore, Missouri, they found two chemical drums holding the bodies of Beverly Bonner and Sheila Faith and her daughter. The other victims’ remains were never found. Robinson confessed to the murder of these other missing women in a Missouri court in 2003 in a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty there. However, over the state line in Kansas, there was enough evidence for the prosecution to secure the death penalty at a second trial.

The On-The-Ball Billionaire

Abduction is a traumatic experience. Kidnap victims who survive their ordeal rarely remember anything of value to detectives, but Oklahoma millionaire Charles Urschel proved to be a shrewd observer with a keener eye for forensic detail than most FBI recruits.

On a warm summer evening in 1933 Urschel was abducted from his front porch at gunpoint by two armed members of a gang led by Public Enemy Number One, Machine Gun Kelly. Fortunately for Urschel, Kelly was not the smartest gangster of the prohibition era. He hadn’t even thought of looking up a photograph of his intended victim in a local newspaper. So when he and his accomplice surprised two elderly men at Urschel’s home that night they had to drag both of them into their car as neither would identify which of them was the billionaire. Later, having rifled through their wallets, the gang tossed Urschel’s friend from the car and sped off down the dirt road to their hideout across the state line.

Kidnapping was a federal offence and so experts from the FBI were swiftly on the scene, but even they had to admit that the chance of locating the gang’s hideout in such a vast landscape was like finding a needle in a haystack. They advised Urschel’s distraught wife to wait it out. Before long a ransom note was received demanding $200,000 in cash and this was accompanied by a letter in Urschel’s handwriting proving that the demand was genuine and that he was still alive.

Taking It All In

Urschel was not only alive, he was more actively involved in his own rescue than the FBI agents. Though blindfolded and bound, he made a mental note of every detail of his lengthy and uncomfortable drive through the night which might prove to be of use, if and when he was finally released. From the sound of the engine and the feel of the seats he identified the car as either a Buick or a Cadillac.

That in itself would have been of little use, but when they later pulled in for gas he overheard one of the gang making conversation with the female pump attendant about local farming conditions and recalled her commenting that the crops thereabouts were ‘all burned up’.

At the next stop he noted that one of the gang mentioned the time, 2.30pm. When they arrived at their destination Urschel was kept blindfolded, but he listened out for any sounds that might give away his location. It was clear from the barnyard noises that he was being kept on a farm and that it had a well with a creaking windlass.

More significantly, the water drawn from that well had a strong metallic taste from the high concentration of minerals. Kelly hadn’t thought of removing his victim’s wristwatch so Urschel was able to make a mental record of the time an aeroplane passed overhead, twice daily except on Sunday when a rainstorm presumably forced it to divert from its usual route.

By the time the ransom was paid and plans were being made to return him to his family, Urschel had managed to leave his fingerprints on everything he could touch. And thanks to the details Urschel had supplied, the FBI were able to identify both the aeroplane and the drought-affected area which it had avoided on that Sunday morning due to the storm. They contacted every airline that operated within a 600-mile radius of Oklahoma City and cross-checked schedules and flight plans until they had identified the flight that Urschel had noted. They pinpointed the farms the plane would have passed over at that time of the morning and again in the evening, which considerably reduced the number of haystacks they would now have to comb to find their needle. At the Shannon ranch they struck lucky. They not only found a member of the gang with his share of the ransom money, they also made a connection with the Kelly gang. They learned that Mr and Mrs Shannon’s daughter Kathryn had married Kelly and even given him his nickname in the hope that the ham-fisted hoodlum who had never fired a gun in anger would be worthy of his reputation.

When Urschel was brought to the farm he immediately identified it as the place where he had been held. Even the water tasted as he had remembered. But most damning was the fine collection of his fingerprints over every surface he could reach which placed him at the scene, one of the few cases in which the victim’s prints proved more significant than those of the criminals. Kelly was incarcerated in Leavenworth, where he died in 1954.

The Paranoid Messiah

It’s hard to know the point at which the Reverend Jim Jones went bad – the dynamics of power and its effects are hard to read. But little by little he turned from being an idealistic young pastor into a fire-and-brimstone flim-flam man – and from there it only got worse. By the end, near Port Kaituma in Guiana, he’d become a paranoid Messiah, preaching a demented millenarianism that was to kill almost a thousand men, women and children.

James Warren Jones was born in 1931 in the heart of America’s Bible Belt, in Lynn, Indiana; and by the age of 12 he was already preaching impromptu street sermons to children and passers-by. He got married to a nurse and started an outreach programme for poor blacks at an Indianapolis Methodist church.

In 1957 he bought a building and opened his own church, the People’s Temple, in an Indianapolis ghetto, preaching a message of racial integration and equality. He and his wife adopted seven children, black, white and Asian; and he took to describing himself as ‘bi-racial,’ pointing up his mother’s Cherokee blood. In return he soon secured the loyalty of a black congregation that rapidly grew as he defied the threats and attacks of white bigots.

In 1963, at the height of American fears about nuclear warfare, he announced that he’d had a vision of a future holocaust in which only two places would be spared: Okiah, California and Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He told his congregation to get ready by selling their houses and withdrawing their savings. Then he flew to Brazil to take a look; and on his return journey stopped over for a few days in the socialist republic of Guiana.

Brazil failed the test. So in 1965, he and three hundred followers settled in Redwood Valley near Okiah, California. They were hard-working, charitable and seemingly deeply religious. They took in problem children and orphans; and impressed the local community enough for Jones to be appointed foreman of the county grand jury and the director of its free legal-aid services.

In 1970, Jones moved his tax-exempt People’s Temple to downtown San Francisco, where membership soon swelled to 7,500, both black and white; and the city turned over part of its welfare programme to it. He was even invited to President Carter’s inauguration in 1976.

By 1976, though, defectors from the People’s Temple were beginning to tell the press about Jones’s obsession with sex: about how he preached sexual abstinence, but treated female members of the church as his harem. There was worse: there were public beatings of children to make them show respect; and there were rehearsals – ‘White Nights’ – for what Jones termed ‘revolutionary suicide.’

By the following year, pressure from the press and public censure had become so intense that Jones put into effect his escape plan. Using the money provided by his congregation, he had already bought a lease on 20,000 acres of jungle in Guiana. In November 1977, he and a thousand members of the congregation moved there. According to a 1978 report in the San Francisco Chronicle, the new community at Jonestown was surrounded by armed guards and subject to ‘public beatings’ and ‘a threat of mass suicide.’

When California Congressman Leo Ryan read this, he decided to talk to the relatives of the people at Jonestown who were afraid they were being held there against their will. He then asked the federal authorities to intervene with the Guianan government, and flew to Jonestown with a team of journalists.

When they arrived at Jonestown, the interviews with Jones and with members of the congregation went well. The citizens of Jonestown still seemed devoted to their leader; and the only sour note that was struck was when Ryan offered to put under his personal protection anyone who wanted to leave.

The next day, when Ryan – who had stayed in Jonestown overnight – was picked up by the reporters, they found twenty congregation-members who wanted to leave with him. There was a scuffle when one of the church elders tried to stab Ryan. So the press, Ryan and defectors fled to the airstrip where their chartered plane was waiting. There they were ambushed by Jones and his armed guards. Ryan, three journalists and two of the defectors were killed.

Back at the settlement, Jones immediately gave orders for mass suicide. Babies had cyanide squirted into their mouths with syringes. Older children drank cups of Kool-Aid laced with poison from huge vats, followed shortly by their parents. When the Guianese army arrived at the settlement the next day, they found whole families embraced in death, and the Reverend Jim Jones with a bullet through his brain.

A suicide note, addressed to Jones, found at the scene read, in part: