“We’re involved with almost any type of crime you can think of,” he says, “but mostly we’re involved with child pornography. We also deal with homicides, fraud, securities fraud, consumer fraud, and narcotics cases. Computers store information about who owes money and store recipes for making the drugs. These things used to be put on paper but now they’re stored electronically.”
Schroeder’s workload had expanded greatly in recent years because computers had become cheaper and people were buying more equipment and becoming more computer savvy. But they still didn’t know that much about how to destroy e-mails or potential evidence. Most people believed they were getting rid of information on their hard drive when they simply deleted it from their system. They weren’t—at least not until the space it occupied had been overwritten. And this was true for the space in as many as five distinct locations for one e-mail: on the sender’s hard drive or backup disks; on the sender’s Internet server; on the other servers of the Internet service provider and the major telecom provider; on the e-mail recipient’s server; and on the recipient’s hard drive or backup disks or any other system that the recipient may have forwarded the e-mail to. Once in cyberspace, an e-mail has a long-standing life that can be traced.
E-mails aren’t deleted, according to Schroeder, unless people take “fairly extraordinary” measures to remove them for good. Without those measures, technologically sophisticated detectives can retrieve them.
“We go in with forensic tools,” he says, “and change the way of thinking in the computer from ‘It’s not there’ to ‘Yes, it’s still in there and we want to recover it.’ There is software written strictly for data recovery, and people can go in for a substantial fee and recover what’s apparently been lost.”
The computer can also find what’s seemingly been deleted by searching through what is known as “ambient data.” Computers operate by filling up voids based on size parameters. To fill a given void, which has been created by a given command, the computer will grab data from a memory bank and use it to fill up the cavity. The information it grabs may apparently have been deleted in the past, but not completely deleted, so it can still be randomly accessed during this process. Computers, like any machine, run on technical commands, and one command is that until it fulfills its space requirements, it can’t move on to the next function. The ambient data that can be retrieved by forensic specialists often contains information important to criminal investigations.
“To the average user,” says Schroeder, “none of this process is visible or known. But that randomly selected memory could hold a blackmail attempt or an extortion plot or a murder scenario or child pornography or a critical conversation between two adults.”
When doing an “autopsy” on a computer, after someone has been arrested and that individual’s property has been seized, the authorities have to follow meticulously the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment rules regarding reasonable “search and seizure” or the evidence will never stand up in court. This creates enormously time consuming tasks and complexities. Most law enforcement people are used to getting a search warrant and going out and looking for a particular item. What happens if you obtain a warrant for someone’s hard drive but then you find things on the disk that you were not specifically hunting for? What if you are investigating one kind of crime but find evidence of several others?
“Let’s say that I’m looking for things on narcotics on a hard drive but I find some things connected to child porn,” Schroeder says. “I have to stop what I’m doing because this isn’t covered by the search warrant. Then I have to go get another warrant. These are all new areas for law enforcement, and new case law is being made daily because of these Fourth Amendment issues. In addition to that, you’ve often got local, state, federal, and international laws involved because of how the Net works. People might be sending e-mail about criminal activities all over the world.
“We are starting to catch up with this criminal frontier. We’ve been behind the curve because of funding and not knowing what the future will hold technically. Once you see a problem, it takes the government time to respond, so you end up in a reactive stance, and the learning curve is enormous. The Internet keeps growing and new viruses are being written each day. No one person can keep up with it. You need one individual for each aspect of this kind of investigation, and you need a hundred people but only have four. So you feel understaffed and everyone who does this work feels that way.”
Schroeder was not involved in the John Robinson case but was familiar with the work done by Mike Jacobson, who would receive an award from the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police for playing a critical role in this investigation. One of the most intriguing questions surrounding Robinson’s upcoming trial was how his computers would be used to prosecute him and what they might reveal about his connections in cyberspace. How these questions were answered in the Olathe courtroom would set precedents for future legal proceedings.
The object of conducting a computer autopsy, Schroeder says, is not necessarily to discover every single item on a hard drive—one drive can now hold millions of pages of documents—but to preserve the data precisely as it is. It can take weeks, even months, to locate a single name on a hard drive, something that nontechnical people in law enforcement often don’t understand. They often think that you can seize the computer today and have the evidence ready by tomorrow, but everything is more complicated than that.
The moment you turn a computer on, you change the configuration of everything that’s in it, which is to say that you can alter the evidence of a crime. The windows and the files “start cookin’,” as Schroeder says, and when that happens, you’ve likely ruined some of the raw data that you most wanted to preserve. Instead of getting the computer and immediately turning it on, which seems to be the natural thing to do, specialists like himself have learned to copy everything off the hard drive first, making exact duplicates of the evidence and then working off the copy and keeping the original data intact.
“Ninety percent of the time,” Schroeder says, “what the criminals think they have erased is still there. It just takes another technique—a trade secret—to get it back. But the search to do that may take two months.”
Prosecutors are not the only ones now eager to retrieve data on the Net. Defense lawyers have also started rummaging through old e-mail to see if they can find messages from police or witnesses that might contradict what someone has said under oath during a legal proceeding. Detectives have to be extremely careful what they commit to this electronic web, because much of it can be found and potentially used against them. What might before have been said in a phone conversation that they were certain was not being overheard is no longer secure in cyberspace. Every word must be weighed before being sent out.
As the Robinson case so well demonstrates, the Internet has become an opportune hunting ground for violent criminals. Investigating these cases is difficult because of jurisdictional problems as well as the lack of training in Internet crimes. While the emphasis in most departments is on child pornography, this case was not about child pornography. Victims came voluntarily to Robinson. In a sense, Robinson was a profiler, a “victim profiler.” His manipulative mind discovered while in prison that the Internet could be another tool for him to use. He also discovered that there are a lot of unhappy people in this world who have needs to fulfill. He saw that he could use these needs to his benefit, both sexually as well as financially. The Internet was a safe harbor for him. When he felt he had the right victim, and the risks of getting caught were low, he would come out from behind his computer and attack.
How many more Robinsons are there in this new technological world? How many other people are there who have been harmed in some way and we don’t know anything about them? I’ve been asked many times how many serial killers are there in the United States. It is difficult to know exactly the actual number of serial killers. Every year approximately ten to twelve serial killers are identified. These are pri
marily men who kill two or three victims or more over time. There is a cooling off period between the homicides that can last days or many months. Serial killers are different from mass murderers because the mass murderer kills four or more people, and sometimes himself, during one event. With the clearance rate for homicides being approximately 64–67 percent, and with eighteen thousand to twenty thousand victims per year, and with over seventeen thousand law enforcement agencies not connected technologically to share crime and criminal information, we’ve created a great opportunity for anyone who wants to hurt or murder someone. At the very least we have thirty to fifty serial killers in the United States at any given time. We have hundreds of unidentified dead in morgues. The Internet can be a great tool, but unfortunately it has become a foe to the law enforcement community.
The anonymity of the Net has clearly bred many more crimes. By the 1980s, the U.S. Customs Service had pretty much eliminated child pornography through the United States Postal Service because it had simply become too risky for the perpetrators to send illegal material through the mail. The pornographers needed physical contacts outside of themselves to distribute their goods. In the 1990s, with the arrival of digital cameras, computer transfers, and the availability of widespread Internet connections, child predators could now do everything alone and reach a marketplace that covered the entire globe.
You could now do all this without seeing or having to trust anybody. Most Internet service providers don’t check to see who you are when you ask to use their service. You could be anyone, even the president of the United States, and they wouldn’t necessarily know this. The Net has created the sense for users that no one knows who they really are, so they can take on a different persona in cyberspace. That feeling of anonymity encourages the feeling that they won’t get caught doing something illegal. They do it once and get away with it, and then they do it again and again.
Laws surrounding explicit sexual material vary from country to country and from state to state—certain kinds of pornography are legal in some nations—and this makes prosecuting these cases even more challenging. If you’re living in Kansas, for example, and in possession of child pornography received from overseas, you are committing a crime, even though the material may have been legal where it was created. In the late 1990s, law enforcement and other local groups lobbied the Kansas legislature until they changed the law so that possessing sexual images of individuals under the age of eighteen was illegal. A more uncharted realm is computer-generated images that may depict an actual person—or not.
“We’ve seen pictures,” says Schroeder, “where someone has cut and pasted body parts together—using arms, legs, breasts, and genitals. Is this a picture of a real child or not? This is a gray area for us.”
Some people use credit cards or checks to buy child pornography. Others employ a much older form of commerce, created centuries earlier in the open marketplace: bartering.
“Let’s say that you have a criminal with a five-to-two ratio,” Schroeder says. “This means that for every five pictures you download from my system, you have to upload two back to me. These ratios are even automated in computers now, so they are programmed to do it exactly this way. Let’s say your interest is very detailed and graphic. I send you some pictures and you say, ‘I like this one but I already have that one.’ So you save what you have and trade the duplicates, and this is how bartering is done. It’s just like trading baseball cards.”
A fine line exists between policing the Net and invading privacy or restricting freedom of expression. Most everyone wants the Net to retain its great feeling of experimentation and to remain an alternative to mainstream media, but few people want it to encourage or protect serious criminal activity. The most important thing you can do is to be in control of yourself and aware of the pitfalls when you log on to the World Wide Web. Nobody can any longer afford to be naive when it comes to cyberspace. Too many people have gone out into the fantasyland of the Internet looking for sex or romance without an awareness of what they were encountering. Not all of them survived.
XXXI
On June 2, 2000, after scouring the Robinson address for evidence, two of the Lenexa detectives executed another search warrant at Need Mor Storage in Olathe. Dan Owsley and Dawn Layman used bolt cutters to open the padlock on the space rented by the suspect. The locker held a trove of information and written materials connecting Robinson to some of the dead women: Suzette Trouten’s passport application, birth certificate, and Social Security card, plus forty-two preaddressed envelopes to members of her family and thirty-one sheets of pastel-colored paper signed at the bottom, “Love ya, Suzette.” The detectives also found a stun gun, a slave contract signed by Trouten, birthday cards, e-mails addressed to J. Robinson, and computer disks. There were several pictures of Suzette and the video he’d made of them in February 2000. They found her journal with a yin-yang symbol on the cover plus a brass unicorn, a jewelry box, and a Mickey Mouse watch.
The locker also contained a Kansas driver’s license for Izabela Lewicka, her Purdue University ID card, and a typed-up slave contract entitled “Basic Slave Rules,” outlining 115 directives for her to obey. Owsley and Layman saw Lewicka’s name on documents for a 1987 Pontiac Bonneville and Alecia Cox’s name on other pastel letters and envelopes. They uncovered the cowboy picture that Robinson had routinely sent out into cyberspace, along with images of women in bondage and a photo of Izabela Lewicka lying nude on a bed with green-and-maroon-patterned linens. These were the same linens she’d brought from Indiana to Kansas.
A black leather case was opened, and inside were several leather floggers, a dark blindfold, clothespins, and three white golf balls inside a small plastic baggie. There were also wooden paddles, an electrical unit, a metal speculum, and lubricants. Vickie Neufeld’s sex toys were also stashed in the locker. In addition to all of the other Robinson personas, he was also a pack rat, having saved things that many people would have long ago thrown away, especially if they were evidence of a crime. Fifteen years of evidence was stacked up in both his home office and the storage locker.
While all this was taking place, Nancy Robinson, sitting in her office, noticed some police activity down the block and assumed that a park occupant had gotten into trouble. It was probably an arrest for a petty offense; these days, that sort of thing happened more often than she wished it would. She was surprised when two detectives, flashing guns and badges, came to her manager’s office and told her that they needed to speak with her—in private. She was much more than surprised when they told her that her husband had just been arrested for sexual battery. She wanted to talk in the parking lot but they insisted on going to the station. During her interview, they asked her about her own sex life. The subject of BDSM Web sites would also come up in her talks with the authorities. In 1998, she would one day reveal, she’d first learned that her husband was surfing these sites. She could tell where he’d been and what he’d seen. When she asked her husband about this, he told her nonchalantly that he’d been exploring the Internet and that was the end of their conversation.
Nancy was quickly released and would not be regarded as an accessory in any of the charges that would be filed against her husband. She tried to go back to work, but in the days ahead she would find that more and more difficult. Reporters kept calling, wanting information about her family or her husband or herself, and this was starting to interfere with her job. Then the media began bothering her employer, the owner of Santa Barbara Estates, and that was more than her bosses were willing to accommodate. She was soon unemployed.
Nancy disappeared from the mobile home park’s managerial office and did not come back. If she or her children felt they’d received bad publicity in years past because of the actions of their husband and father, they were not prepared for what was coming. It would dwarf anything they’d experienced as a result of their connections to John Robinson.
The police had released Nancy without further questioning, but in the upcoming days an
d weeks her behavior would arouse a lot of speculation at Santa Barbara Estates and beyond. Residents throughout the park wondered aloud if she was involved in any aspect of the things her spouse was being accused of. And if she wasn’t, how could she have lived with someone for as long as she’d lived with Robinson and not have known or at least sensed what he was doing with all these other women for a decade and a half? How could you be that close to someone and not realize who he really was? Who could possibly be this blind?
Communities, especially small communities, hate being fooled—particularly by those they’ve come to like and trust. Once fooled, their old feelings of affection and trust often curdle into a disappointment and anger that spill out onto anyone who might have destroyed their innocence or helped protect a perpetrator. They don’t like being shocked, and the shock waves were just beginning at Santa Barbara Estates. The following day the entire city and region would get a nasty jolt. The waves would spread all across the nation and the Internet.
For decades Robinson had been an extremely busy man. The authorities were about to see just how busy he’d been.
XXXII
Saturday, June 3, was unusually hot for eastern Kansas. By 9 A.M. the sun was scorching and the air would turn more oppressive with each passing hour, pushing the thermometer past ninety. A few hours earlier, a band of police cars had left Olathe and driven south on Interstate 35, then turned onto Highway 69 and kept going south, passing through the town of La Cygne and moving on to the farm owned by Robinson. Present were the Lenexa and Overland Park Police Departments, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, criminologists, and the Linn County Sheriff’s Department. The group had brought along trained German shepherds, known as cadaver dogs. They’d brought shovels and gloves and all manner of forensic equipment, ready to set up a makeshift crime lab right on the premises, if necessary. They’d brought divers to look in Robinson’s snake-infested pond. The cops shot at the snakes throughout the day.
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