In Barrel #2, Dr. Young found another deceased female, this one with long dark hair and dressed in jeans, socks, white shoes, and a T-shirt that read “California, A State of Mind.” Her upper denture had been broken in half and fractures were on the back of her head and face. The injuries were consistent with hammer blows, and this body had a broken right forearm, a defensive wound. The triangular shaped hole in her head was the size of an orange. When dental records failed to provide good enough information on the bodies found in Barrels #2 and #3, Michael Finegan, a forensic anthropologist at Kansas State University, was brought into the case. He’d once helped identify the remains of outlaw Jesse James and now looked at the evidence pulled from the storage unit. He determined that Barrel #2 held the body of Sheila Faith. Barrel #3 contained another, younger female, this one upside down, with long brown hair and wearing green knit pants, a green pullover shirt, and one sock. The final victim was a teenager with a degenerative condition and a misshapen pelvis: Debbie Faith, Sheila’s daughter. Like the other two females, Debbie had suffered multiple severe blows, about the size of a golf ball, to the side of her head, and her body showed no defensive wounds. Dr. Young thought that the three women, due to their advanced stage of decomposition, had not been dead for months, but years.
“I’m not accustomed,” he said, “to looking at bodies in barrels.”
With the discovery of the two bodies in Kansas and then three more in Missouri, Robinson’s bond was immediately raised to $5 million, the highest ever set in Johnson County. The investigation into the man’s on-line and off-line activities now mushroomed, with the task force growing to nearly forty members from both Kansas and Missouri. Some detectives traveled to Florida to look at his former property at Big Pine Key, others kept searching for more evidence at the farm and at Santa Barbara Estates, while still others made contact with many different people who’d once interacted with the suspect. A number of them had connections to the on-line world of sadomasochism.
“Some people came forward to talk to us,” says Detective Boyer, “and I’m sure some haven’t.”
As part of the education of Boyer and the Lenexa Police Department, the detectives became familiar with what had been described as the bible of the S&M culture: Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns.
“Some people are very embarrassed by the lifestyle,” Boyer says. “There are a lot of people in it, whether you realize it or not. They’re in it, but they don’t flaunt it. They kind of keep to themselves and they don’t want to be drug out by the media.”
But the media was suddenly intrigued with this subject and was all over the Robinson case. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today published stories that the nation’s—if not the world’s—first Internet serial killer suspect had just been arrested in Kansas. The tiny village of La Cygne was quickly overrun with journalists from national newspapers and magazines looking for details and insights into the man who’d often passed through their community on the way to his farm. The problem was that virtually no one in La Cygne had been aware of John Robinson. Most people couldn’t have picked his photo out of a lineup or ever recalled meeting him. He’d kept to himself, quietly grabbing a meal or a tank of gasoline in the town before going about his business on the farm. The locals had had no idea who he was, and this was the last kind of publicity that La Cygne, with its colorful banners of swans hanging from light poles and its big white swan planters standing on street corners, wanted for itself.
As reporters scoured the Kansas countryside, police began searching for women who’d spoken with Robinson in cyberspace or traded pictures with him, but getting them to come forward was proving difficult. Any woman was naturally reluctant to admit that she’d once been interested in pursuing sexual or financial connections with someone who was about to be charged with killing at least five other women. Some officers tried to match photographs found on Robinson’s computer with real women, and others attempted to match names they’d downloaded from his hard drive with the names of other potential victims. Robinson had used at least three cyber-aliases—Slavemaster, James Turner, and JT—if not many more. He’d sought out new women on numerous Web sites and chat rooms. All of this amounted to a massively entangled criminal investigation that would take a long time to unravel and catalog.
While some detectives hunted on the Net, others contacted Alecia Cox, who drove them to a fourplex at 901 Edgebrook in Olathe. She told them that back in 1999 when she was still involved with Robinson, the two had gone to an apartment here, which Robinson claimed to own. Alecia had seen that the apartment was unfurnished except for a few boxes, a computer, and several articles of women’s clothing. Robinson had told Alecia that the girl who used to live here had moved away with her boyfriend. Robinson and Alecia had had sex at the apartment and she’d picked out a few pieces of the used clothing. Alecia next drove the police to another apartment in Overland Park where Robinson had put her up for two or three days. This furnished apartment was where Barbara Sandre had once lived, and Robinson had told Alecia that it belonged to a friend of his who was out of the country. While snooping around in Sandre’s closets, Cox had noticed clothes that were conservative, dressier, and made for someone quite a bit larger than herself. If Cox had given the investigators some good leads into Robinson’s involvement with several women, she herself was shocked to learn from them that her ex-lover was a serial-murder suspect.
And she’d been living with, if not wearing, a dead woman’s garments. The evidence recovered from Alecia—a white camisole, a black velvet shirt, and a green velvet dress—would later be identified by Danuta Lewicka as having belonged to her daughter, Izabela.
Julia Brown, who’d once rented the Edgebrook apartment to John Robinson, told the officers that when the man had moved out in 1999 and the apartment had been inspected, the only thing left behind was an empty fish tank. The living room and bathrooms were filthy, with cobwebs everywhere and even the beginnings of a termite tunnel. The bedrooms, however, were meticulously clean and looked as though they’d been freshly painted.
“It looked like someone sucked all the dirt out of the area,” Brown told them.
Before forensic analysts could do testing on this apartment, the family living at the Edgebrook fourplex had to be temporarily relocated. Then investigators found blood splatters on one bedroom wall, and this blood, along with that from the duct tape taken from Robinson’s farm, proved to be Lewicka’s.
Another part of the task force contacted Barbara Sandre, now living in Toronto, who gave them permission to search the duplex in Overland Park. Like Alecia, Barbara was stunned to learn that she was part of a homicide investigation. Some of her possessions were still packed up at the duplex, waiting to be moved to Canada. Items seized from this location included an antique coffee grinder, a brass mortar and pestle, and several pieces of artwork, some signed “John 2000,” others “John ’92.” There were over a hundred books, most with occult themes. All had belonged to Lewicka. At the duplex, Sandre had neatly packed her linens inside a large plastic garbage can, which held some green-and-maroon-patterned sheets. When Detective Dawn Layman, who helped execute the search warrant at this address, spotted these sheets, she immediately recognized that the pattern matched that of the pillowcase from the barrel holding Lewicka.
On July 10, Detective Hughes executed a search warrant on Robinson while he was incarcerated in the Johnson County jail. The warrant allowed him to take samples of Robinson’s blood, saliva, and head and pubic hair. Robinson cooperated fully, pulling out at least one hundred of his own hairs.
By August, the police had accumulated reports on Robinson that ran to eleven thousand pages and would one day double that figure.
“This case,” Paul Morrison had announced to the media in one of his first public appearances after Robinson’s arrest, “has to do with the suspect having numerous contacts throughout the United States who share similar interests, over, among other things, the Internet.”
He added
that there was a significant financial aspect to the investigation.
What Morrison didn’t say and what he couldn’t have known at the time was that Robinson’s wild ride on the Internet had almost exactly paralleled the dot-com boom that flourished throughout the late 1990s. Some investors made millions of dollars almost overnight and many people grew rich through the inflated stock prices. But then the bubble burst. One reason, analysts later speculated, was that everything had happened too fast and people had simply gotten greedy to make more and more. They’d overreached, and what had gone up began to come down. Now fortunes were lost as quickly as they had been made. Robinson had gotten greedy too. Before the arrival of the Internet, he’d managed to hold all of his scams and identities together. He’d been somewhat limited in the number of women he had access to at one time. Cyberspace had changed all that.
He’d used the Net to auction himself off to an unlimited number of female contacts. Then he’d picked and chosen among the most vulnerable or desperate, but his reach had also finally exceeded his grasp. By the spring of 2000, just as the dot-com businesses were starting to level off or tumble, Robinson could no longer micromanage everything and everyone he needed to. His hunger for more and more women finally consumed him. And then his bubble burst.
XXXV
Before long, investigators had linked to Robinson a sixth missing person, Lisa Stasi, and then a seventh, Catherine Clampitt, and then an eighth, Paula Godfrey. No one knew what the final number might be. Apparently, no one knew much about Robinson, either, including his wife and children. Following his arrest, they released a statement saying that they did not recognize the person whom media reports were making out to be a monster, the epitome of evil in cyberspace. That was not, as far as they could tell, a description of their husband or father, not the man who’d married or raised them. He couldn’t have been torturing and killing young women who were about the age of his own daughters, not while he was doing everything else with them, could he?
That kind of beast was not anyone his family had ever seen—and they’d been living with or interacting with him throughout the past several decades. If the reports were true and Robinson had really done these horrific things to the victims, then he must have been someone very different from the person they perceived. His life must have had parts that were never allowed to touch one another and that were always kept separate inside.
The police in suburban Kansas City had uncovered the trail of a serial killer, which in modern America was not that uncommon. As mentioned previously, the FBI has estimated that at any given moment there are between thirty and fifty serial killers in the United States, of whom ten to twelve are identified. Many of the unsolved cases are called “stranger homicides,” meaning that there is no relationship between the killer and the victim. These victims are quite easy for the violent offender to locate; every major city that has prostitution, runaways, drug addicts, and street people/homeless will have unsolved homicides. For years in Vancouver, for example, there were missing women who had worked as prostitutes. Until 2001, law enforcement believed that they must have moved on to another city, then four of these women were found murdered and authorities began looking for around fifty more who they felt might be victims of a serial killer.
Many people believe that all serial killers fit the same mold and follow similar patterns of behavior, but at the FBI, we discovered that this image is false. When I was transferred to the FBI Academy in 1977, I began doing research in the area of criminal psychology and the criminal mind. The majority of the research was from a rehabilitative perspective, correctional perspective, or probation/parole perspective. No research was available from a law enforcement or investigative perspective. Criminals were identified and labeled with psychiatric/psychological terms such as psychopath, paranoid, schizophrenia, etc. To complicate matters, when I interviewed people like Charles Manson, they were sometimes categorized as psychopathic and at other times as schizophrenic. These terms meant little to the law enforcement community and me. I teamed up with colleague Roy Hazelwood and together we came up with three categories for violent crime: disorganized, organized, and mixed. A disorganized killer is very much what the name implies. His crimes are random and a lot of forensic evidence is left behind because of the killer’s state of mind. Mental illness, drugs, and /or alcohol may affect the offender, and this will in turn affect the appearance of the crime scene. An organized killer, on the other hand, carries out well-planned and premeditated homicides, and little or no evidence is left behind linking the suspect to his crime. The mixed category often occurs when more than one offender is present at the scene or when a crime starts out well planned but then something or someone interferes with the perpetrator and things become too unpredictable or messy to control. By describing criminals and crime scenes in simple, understandable terms it became easier to profile crimes of violence. Although we had these categories, we found criminals may at times show elements from more then one category.
For example, the Nicole Brown Simpson case showed elements of both an organized and disorganized offender. The killer brought a weapon to the scene and wore gloves and a knit cap, all of which fit the organized category. However, the method and manner of Ron Goldman’s death was different from Brown’s. Some believe there may have been two killers and that would explain why Nicole and Ron were killed differently. It is my opinion this double homicide was the work of a single killer. Ron Goldman put up a stronger fight, and the killer did not expect this to happen. Goldman was slashed, cut, and stabbed before collapsing and bleeding to death. Nicole Brown, on the other hand, was struck in the head and was unconscious when the killer cut at her throat with such fury that she was nearly decapitated.
John Robinson appeared to be the organized type and in some ways conjured up John Gacy, who murdered thirty-three boys and young men in Des Plaines, Illinois. By day Gacy was a building contractor, was engaged in local politics, and had even had his photo taken with President Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn. Gacy dressed as a clown for charity benefits and was married, but by night he was a serial killer. He was very organized during many of the murders, but he finally grew careless and was eventually arrested. Serial killer Robert Hansen (fifteen victims) was from Anchorage, Alaska. The owner of a bakery, he was married and had two children, but when his wife and children went away on trips, he turned into a different human being. He took prostitutes in his private plane into the Alaskan wilderness, and after landing at a remote area, he stripped the women naked and had them attempt to flee by giving them a head start in the woods. Then he doggedly tracked them down, like a wild animal, killing them with a high-powered rifle.
Robinson was different from these men in one primary area: his long criminal history as a scam artist. Serial killers often have pasts that involve other violent crimes, but Robinson had seemingly evolved toward violence over decades. He’d graduated from one type of criminal to the next. He was always a work in progress.
The Kansas City area had seen serial killers before, but what it was encountering in June 2000 was different from anything in the past. No one had ever heard of somebody transferring his seductive and homicidal skills directly onto the Internet. No one had seen this coming. It appeared that the world’s first known on-line serial killer had just been uncovered in a mobile home park in a Midwest suburb. By the first week of June 2000, people were starting to ask a lot of questions about John Edward Robinson. What had he really done for a living? Where had his money come from? How long had he been able to get away with committing crimes? How had he fooled prison psychologists so completely? Did his wife know more than she was saying? How could he have evolved from a petty con man into the person the public was reading about in the paper—what had driven him toward such brutal acts? Why hadn’t anyone understood what lay behind his facade? And what was going on in cyberspace that the average on-line user knew nothing about?
Information about Robinson began pouring in from every side. As the facts piled up
—outlining his long criminal record and a string of victims going back more than thirty years—the story stretched credulity almost until the breaking point. The facts also conveyed two fundamental warnings: monsters aren’t necessarily born but are made over time, and you never knew who you might encounter in cyberspace.
While the media looked for new angles and the police continued their investigations, the twin prosecution teams from Kansas and Missouri tried to find a way to work together to bring Robinson to trial. Almost from the start there was conflict. The case involved a myriad of crimes, five bodies found in two states, several different jurisdictions, three missing persons, a baby that had never been located, and a pair of DAs with distinctly different styles. If Paul Morrison resembled an old-fashioned lawman, Chris Koster evoked a handsome kid just out of college who was looking for a role on a TV show about law and order. Their backgrounds and experience added to the natural rivalry that had long existed between Kansas and Missouri—a rivalry that was about to resurface following Robinson’s arrest. Morrison had grown up in Kansas City, Kansas, while Koster, who was nearly a decade his junior, had been born on the other side of Missouri, in St. Louis. After graduating from the University of Missouri with a law degree in 1991, he’d gone to work in the Missouri attorney general’s office and then taken a job at a Kansas City law firm. Three years later, his public ambitions emerged when he won the district attorney’s job in Cass County, roughly half an hour’s drive south and east of Kansas City. In 1998, he won the office again.
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