“It’s all about marriage,” he says, “and it’s not really very religious. It’s about living together and getting along. People who have been married a long time tell you what to expect—and you’re not going to get this from your parents.”
By the late winter of 2000, all of his years of legal preparation and all of what he knew about being patient and thorough were going to be necessary tools for what he was facing in the early stages of the Robinson investigation. Nothing this entangled and multidimensional had ever before come across his desk.
“We had issues related to multiple states and jurisdiction,” he says. “We had an investigation that had taken about fifteen years and some of it had occurred out of state. We had financial and computer issues. This case is almost as complex as it gets.”
The DA, along with many other criminal justice personnel in both Kansas and Missouri, was painfully conscious that long ago John Robinson had managed to walk away from the disappearances of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine Clampitt. Now it seemed that he may have returned to the game of hunting female prey and killing them by luring them to Kansas through the Internet. Morrison and those on the task force were extremely aware of the con man’s ability to work the legal system to his advantage and to escape being connected to crimes of violence because of a lack of evidence. He’d slipped through their grasp time and time again, before going back to his old behavioral patterns. Instead of being changed or rehabilitated, he’d only grown into a more and more sophisticated adversary, which is typical of serial offenders.
For all these reasons, when Morrison launched the new investigation in March 2000, he was absolutely determined that if the man was arrested this time over the disappearance of Suzette Trouten, the charges had to stick. They could not proceed until they were ready and had solid evidence. As of April 2000, even though they were continually surveilling Robinson and had many suspicions, they had little real evidence to go on. They needed a break.
As in many other jurisdictions and many other cases, these dynamics created tension between the DA’s office, the police investigating Robinson, and the families whose daughters were missing. Once Robinson had been singled out as the chief suspect in the Suzette Trouten case, there was pressure to move forward and see him arrested. Morrison would not be budged. The investigators still didn’t have enough even to get search warrants for his home and farm. They needed witnesses and physical evidence before they could make their case.
If Robinson was arrested, Morrison himself would prosecute the defendant, along with Assistant DA Sara Welch. Morrison wasn’t going to go to war until he was prepared and certain that he could win. This time there couldn’t be any mistakes.
“I’m pretty invested in this case,” Morrison once said, when talking about Robinson. “The amount of victimization that he has wrought on people is beyond comprehension. In so many ways, everyday people have been victimized by him, and from that standpoint, it’s extraordinarily important that he be stopped.”
XXVII
The task force was kept in constant motion that spring watching the frenetically busy John Robinson. They went to the Guest House Suites and spoke to employees. They had Carol Trouten page the suspect and get him to phone her back, so they could make a recording of the call in the hope that it would lead to the issuing of a search warrant (it didn’t). They asked a judge to allow them to tap all his phones. They delved further into Robinson’s criminal past and tried to unravel what his pattern of behavior had been and what it might be now. They considered going to Nova Scotia to talk with Lore and advise her on using the Internet to get Robinson to make incriminating statements. They researched more books and Web sites on the bondage lifestyle. They thought about sending a couple of detectives back to Quantico, Virginia, the home of my old FBI Behavioral Science Unit. Ultimately, the detectives did not travel to Quantico but spoke to some local FBI personnel.
“They were trying to help us figure out what kind of person we were dealing with,” says Detective Boyer, “because John Robinson comes across as a typical family man with a wife and kids and grand-kids. He’s got a double-wide mobile home with a nice yard and toys and all that for his grandkids. The FBI was there to assist us and basically get a line on Mr. Robinson.”
Profilers are generally brought into a case after all logical leads have been exhausted. However, I’ve worked numerous cases where I was brought in early in an investigation. In the early 1980s, I was brought into the child killings in Atlanta. While I provided on-site consultation, the killer continued to murder young children, “placing” them in areas where they could easily be found. In the kidnapping cases I’ve been brought into quickly, it was because time is everything. If you don’t identify the kidnapper within forty-eight hours, the child will in most cases be killed.
What a profiler can provide depends on the type of case as well as the information you have to work with. For example, in a kidnapping, I could be working to develop a press release. I know from previous research that kidnappers, along with other violent criminals, follow the press. Therefore, the press release is critical. We do not want to scare or challenge the kidnapper. We want the kidnapper to know we have organized a task force and will ultimately find him. I want to emphasize finding the child and focus less on apprehending the offender.
In the Robinson case, profilers could have worked on interview interrogation strategies with investigators. This is an area in law enforcement where more training is necessary. An investigation may take two years of hard work, but when it comes to the interview/interrogation, maybe two minutes is spent on planning the strategy. The interview/interrogation is an acquired skill and a profiling team would be very beneficial in a case like this. In some respects the case was simple because forensics would link him to the victims. A profile is not necessary when the police have their man. In the Robinson case, it wasn’t a question of who did it, but how and why he did these murders. Therefore, what a profiler could provide would be an assessment of Robinson, a complete look at his life and his behavior as a killer. The prosecutor could use this assessment during the trial so the jury would have a better understanding of the man being tried. Jurors would look at the accused and see a middle-aged, slightly overweight, grandfatherly man who did not look at all threatening. In contrast, they would also see photographs of the victims and the crimes that could sicken them to a point where some might have to look away. Profilers could help jurors understand how a grandfather could do something like this.
Early on in the Robinson investigation, research data collected over the years by my former unit could have been utilized in obtaining a search warrant—because crimes such as these are driven by fantasy, there is the need to perpetuate the fantasy. To do this, the killers become collectors. They have the need to keep mementos or souvenirs related to their crimes. In this regard, Robinson was no different from other serial murderers. He kept clothing and jewelry belonging to the victims. He made videos of his sexual encounters with at least one of them. A killer’s souvenirs become key pieces of law enforcement’s evidence. Research data collected by myself and others could have been used to strengthen the probable cause in a search warrant for Robinson’s property.
In April, Lore Remington continued to play a submissive role on the Internet with JT, but she feared the worst. She understood the subculture of Gorean relationships, in which masters make submissives cut all ties with family and friends. By isolating the submissives, the masters hope to take complete control of their lives. One possibility was that Robinson had sold Suzette to someone in the International Council of Masters. As bad as that might have been, at least it held out the hope that she was still alive. Remington kept receiving e-mails from Suzette, but they’d done nothing to ease her concerns.
While all these activities were swirling around Robinson, he continued his business and sexual pursuits on and off the Net, unaware that he was being closely monitored. He didn’t know that the police were following him to Internet caf�
�s, where he logged on and spoke to his contacts in cyberspace. These cafés were handy for people like him because it was far more difficult to track his on-line movements when he used a public facility than when he was on his personal computers. He didn’t know that the Lenexa police were surveilling him at his mobile home from 7 A.M. to 11 P.M., seven days a week.
While one officer pretended to sunbathe in one of Robinson’s neighbor’s backyard, others posed as utility workers and climbed light poles to spy on his storage unit. He didn’t know they were working with the local garbage collection agency to pick up his trash bags before dawn and replace them with someone else’s bags that looked exactly like his. Then they took his bags to the police station and sorted through each piece, even those that had been shredded. They eventually found a mail receipt for the letters he’d sent overnight to Jean Glines in San Jose. He didn’t realize that when he escorted women to motels around suburban Kansas City, officers tailed him and asked the employees to let them know if he booked anyone into one of their rooms for an extended stay. They were prepared with audio and visual equipment in case a new woman checked in.
Robinson didn’t know that when he drove down to his farm near La Cygne, the police were right behind him in unmarked cars, staying with him until he pulled off the gravel road and turned into his long driveway. He didn’t know they watched him ride all around Kansas City as he talked constantly on his cell phone. The police were amazed at how prolific Robinson was—going to the farm, driving down to his storage units in Raymore, Missouri, running several business operations, living and interacting with his wife in Olathe, interacting with many women in cyberspace, and continually starting up new relationships. Despite the aggressiveness of their surveillance, the authorities had thus far found nothing that would clearly implicate Robinson in a crime. Near the end of April, Robinson left Kansas City for a family reunion, and his sudden disappearance greatly concerned the task force. They wondered if he would come back. They needed a fresher contact to Robinson and one was about to arrive via the Internet.
Vickie Neufeld, an attractive, blond psychologist in her thirties from Galveston, Texas, had been exploring her interest in the S&M subculture for the past half decade. She had a master’s degree in counseling and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. By the spring of 2000, she’d been divorced for several years (she had two children) and was in an emotionally and financially fragile state when John Robinson answered her ad on a BDSM Web site. She’d been working with a geriatric population but lost her job on March 10, 2000, and was looking for financial support. Week by week, she was falling behind in her bills. Even though she was in the business of offering therapy to others, she’d lately been feeling bad about herself as a woman and as a professional.
She was taking antidepressant and antianxiety medications and had placed an ad on the Net to find a long-term, monogamous relationship. Neufeld had a spanking fetish and was seeking an arrangement in which a strong male would be her dominant and she would be his submissive. For many people, the desire to establish this kind of connection was not merely sexual or even necessarily monetary. It had more to do with emotional vulnerability than anything else. It was a chance to get away from your own life for a while and to let someone else make decisions for you. It was a break from adult responsibility. Neufeld had reached this place herself and hoped to find the answers to her dilemma in cyberspace.
She received a lot of responses to her ad, but the most promising one came from a man in Kansas City named J.R. He explained to her that he wasn’t just any master, but belonged to an elite group of “dominants” and was highly respected in this subculture. Vickie was impressed with his qualifications and the two began exchanging e-mails and phone calls. She soon received his standard cowboy photo of himself on the farm. When Neufeld told Robinson that she was looking for work as well as a sexual relationship, he said that he was divorced and a prominent local businessman. He was financially secure, had many local contacts among doctors and psychologists, and could help her find what she was searching for. He asked her to send along her qualifications so he could get her job interviews in Kansas and Missouri. Perhaps he could help her get licensed as a therapist in Kansas. Encouraged, Neufeld accepted his offer and they decided to rendezvous in Kansas City. He wired her $100 to make the trip and she was eager to go. She had complex reasons for leaving Texas and starting up a new life a couple of states to the north.
“Sex was important,” she would later acknowledge, but not her “underlying motivation.” She was looking for help on just about every level.
On Easter Sunday, April 23, after driving seven hundred miles from Texas with her dog, Neufeld arrived in Overland Park and checked into Room 120 of Extended Stay America, where Robinson had arranged to meet her. He wasn’t there and didn’t make an appearance that evening, but some other people were on hand for her arrival.
Unbeknownst to either Robinson or Neufeld, the Lenexa Police Department had been tipped off that Robinson had booked his regular room at this hotel—#120—which indicated that a woman would soon be checking in here for at least several days. When Neufeld went to the room, detectives had already been on the premises for a day, taking two other rooms that adjoined #120 and setting up video and surveillance equipment. They watched her carry her luggage and a bag holding $700 worth of sex toys into the room. Like Neufeld, they were expecting Robinson to show up that first night but were disappointed. They maintained their vigil at Extended Stay around the clock and none of the officers were detected.
The following morning Robinson was going to show up after eight but didn’t arrive until nine-thirty. He was carrying a large duffel bag and explained to her that he was always running late and had just arrived back in Kansas City from a business venture out of town. He would be off again soon for an important meeting in Israel. Neufeld was quickly impressed with his intelligence and charisma. He was well-groomed, well-spoken, and had a convincing way of presenting himself.
“I’d gotten dressed and wanted to look presentable,” Neufeld says. “I’d made coffee and offered him some. I was dressed professionally. We both sat down. He asked if I’d gotten a slave contract and I said I’d downloaded it from the Internet.”
Robinson wanted her to sign the contract but she said she had some reservations. On the other side of the wall, detectives listened to this discussion. She didn’t care for some of the terms he was proposing—for example, that she would give her body to him in any way that he demanded. She had concerns about that. She wanted some addenda to the contract stating that if the relationship didn’t develop well, Robinson wouldn’t put her out in the street, that he would never hurt her dog, and that she could live with him until she could find work. After making these revisions, she signed the contract.
Vickie had taken some other precautions as well. Before leaving Texas, she’d told a friend that she was going to Kansas City to explore a new sexual relationship with a potential master. The friend, who was alarmed that an intelligent and accomplished woman like Neufeld would do this with a total stranger, insisted that Vickie have a system in place to ensure her safety. While she was in Kansas, Neufeld was to phone her friend every three hours to let this person know that she was all right, and if these calls stopped, the friend would notify the police and tell them to go to the hotel.
The conversation about the contract lasted twenty minutes. Then Robinson was ready for action. He told Vickie that if there was chemistry between them, they would pursue a relationship and she could stay in his five-bedroom home until a job came through (before coming to Kansas, she had sent Robinson her résumé and Social Security number). He took off his clothes and lay down on the bed, saying this was how they would find out if they connected sexually.
“He wanted me to lay down beside him,” she says. “He unbuttoned my dress and took my clothes off. He said he wanted us to hug and be close to each other. He wanted me to rub his chest and I did that. He asked me to perform oral sex on him and I tried but he said
I wasn’t doing it right.” He told her she was unsophisticated in her techniques.
Robinson brought out a camera and took pictures of Vickie while she performed fellatio.
“I didn’t know he had a camera,” she says, “and didn’t want him to do this. He said, ‘Let’s try this a different way.’ He got up and pulled me by my hair and he wanted me on my knees while he was on a chair. He moved my head back and forth until he ejaculated. He grabbed my hair and took pictures with his other hand.”
By now, Vickie was “gagging and feeling kind of sick.” Robinson asked her if his semen was sour and explained to her that if he ate celery, it would be sweeter.
Despite her fear and disgust, when Vickie later made contact with her “safe” connection back in Texas, she told her friend that she’d met Robinson and things were fine. She didn’t call again, and she didn’t stop the new affair because, as she once put it, “I wanted him to think that I was worthy of a job opportunity.”
The police, meanwhile, continued listening quietly but intently to the whole scene in the next room.
Robinson abruptly got up, dressed, and prepared to leave, giving her $50 for food and other necessities. She was surprised at this paltry sum, as she’d assumed that he was a wealthy man; after they’d become intimate, she’d at least expected him to take her out to dinner. Before going, he opened his duffel bag and showed Neufeld what struck her as very serious sexual devices: chains, ropes, leather restraints, collars, and floggers. He left the bag in the hotel room. She wondered if all this was more than she could handle. She wondered if she should head back to Texas—now—but she’d signed a contract with Robinson and he’d taken it with him when he’d left the hotel.
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