While Morrison represented one of the fastest-growing suburban areas in his state, Koster’s jurisdiction had a rural feel and constituency. Morrison was used to managing and trying high-profile murder cases himself; Koster’s county hadn’t even had a homicide for the past couple of years. Morrison worked in a large office in a square, bland, modern-looking government building in Olathe. Koster worked in a small space across the street from the elegant nineteenth-century Cass County Courthouse, located in the town square in Harrisonville, which conjured up nothing so much as the antebellum South. With its stately courtrooms, immaculate wooden staircases, beautiful wainscoting, and crowning bell tower, the courthouse brought to mind another era and another period in the history of criminal justice, when men were summarily hanged for stealing horses. If Johnson County seemed Northern and urban, Cass County retained vestiges of the Old South. In the spring of 2000, such comparisons wouldn’t have meant much if things had gone smoothly after Robinson was taken into custody—but they hadn’t. Shades of the old interstate feud, fueled by the Civil War, were being rekindled.
Morrison’s task force had wanted to do everything exactly by the book so that Robinson would not only eventually be convicted but later lose when he tried to appeal his conviction; he’d wriggled free of the legal system far too many times in the past. This was one reason the DA had waited so long to arrest him. What Morrison didn’t want was anyone tampering with his view of how to handle the case. In one form or another, the greater Kansas City area had been victimized by this man for about thirty-five years, and unless due process was diligently carried out now, he might find a way to beat these charges. That simply could not be allowed to happen.
The first sign of trouble between the two jurisdictions came on July 6, about a month after the arrest. Chris Koster announced to a local newspaper, the Democratic Missourian, that his county was “ready to go” in the prosecution of Robinson. By this time, a preliminary hearing for the defendant in Kansas had already been postponed, until October, and postponed in Missouri as well. Koster went on to say that to speed things up, he was formulating a plan to transport Robinson back and forth across state lines so he could attend hearings in both states. The young DA, now taking on the biggest case of his career, seemedto be getting impatient with the process. If Kansas got to try Robinson first, and Missouri didn’t get to bring him to Cass County and try him for several more years, witnesses might forget what had happened and their testimony would end up being stale or something worse.
This was all it took to push Morrison’s legal and emotional buttons. These public statements were the kind of thing that could torpedo the best-laid courtroom strategies, even before they were initiated. If Robinson could somehow manage to turn this conflict to his advantage and go free again…. Nobody inside the Olathe courthouse wanted to contemplate that possibility. When informed of Koster’s quote, Morrison fired off his response in the pages of the Kansas City Star:
“My understanding is there are serious legal problems with bringing a prisoner back and forth across state lines. We just can’t control the variables, and it would be an understatement to say we would be playing with fire if we attempted any of that.”
What Morrison didn’t come right out and say was that his county had been working nonstop on the Robinson case for the past four months and had done all the legwork leading to the suspect’s incarceration. It had employed numerous police and other investigators, had traveled around the nation hunting down leads and spent a lot of money doing this, had gone into the nether reaches of the Internet to find out what Robinson had been doing on-line, had uncovered the two bodies on the farm, and had obtained the search warrants that had led to the discovery of three more victims in Raymore. The Cass County DA and his people had shown up—after all the frustration and sweat and expense—and then reveled in the glory of the arrest and the attention of the media. There wouldn’t be any case in Harrisonville, the Johnson County DA’s office knew, if Morrison’s crew and the Kansas cops hadn’t done their job well. Because they had been diligent and successful, Robinson was locked up in one of their jails, and that was where they wanted him to stay. Until he’d been tried and convicted in Olathe, the state of Missouri and Cass County and Chris Koster could just wait.
It wasn’t long before the Kansas City Star jumped into this controversy and came down on Morrison’s side, while giving the younger DA a public spanking.
“Koster’s scheme,” the paper wrote, “to haul Robinson back and forth across the state line so Koster can score some prosecutorial points before Morrison should be halted in its tracks.”
In the end, Johnson County prevailed and Robinson stayed put in the Adult Detention Center. He would not be traveling anywhere for a long time, except to cross the street for his court appearances. His preliminary hearing was set for the fall of 2000, but it would be postponed for months. The Cass County DA could not have imagined how long he would have to wait.
XXXVI
The next delicate issue confronting Morrison concerned Tiffany Stasi. The Johnson County DA was now faced with informing several people that the baby Don and Helen Robinson had “adopted” from his brother for $5,500 back in 1985 had not come by normal channels or from a mother who’d committed suicide. The state of Kansas was not simply charging Robinson with the capital murders of Suzette Trouten and Izabela Lewicka. In late July, the DA’s office also accused him of first-degree murder in the death of Lisa Stasi and of aggravated interference with the parental custody of her infant daughter, Tiffany. In addition to these four counts, there were four more in the original indictment, ranging from sexual assault on Vickie Neufeld and Jeanna Milliron to the theft of the former’s sex toys.
That summer Morrison had approached Carl Stasi, Tiffany’s biological father, with the news of what had happened (Carl then submitted to a DNA test to prove that he was in fact her dad). To the relief of everyone, Carl hoped to be able to see his daughter but would not try to win custody of her. Morrison’s office also informed Don and Helen Robinson where Tiffany, whom they’d renamed Heather, had come from. This led to the very touchy subject of whether Heather, now fifteen and living in the Midwest, should have her name and picture revealed by the media. Both Morrison and the Robinson couple tried to protect her, but the secret was quickly out and the Kansas City Star ran her high school photograph on the front page.
At a press conference, Don and Helen went public for the first time with their feelings about what his brother had done back in 1985. They did not deliver the comments themselves but had FBI special agent Dick Tarpley read them to the media:
“We too have been betrayed…. We have and will continue to cooperate with the authorities investigating the allegations surrounding John Robinson. We love our daughter very much. Since her adoption, which was never kept from her, we have always assumed that as she became an adult, she would be curious about her birth family. Because we were unaware whom her birth family was, it was our intention to assist her in any way possible in her efforts in identifying and locating them.
“The circumstances surrounding the investigation of John Robinson are as distressing to our immediate family as they are to the other families victimized. Our daughter is aware of the investigation and we are doing our best to help her through this difficult time.”
The other Robinson family, comprising Nancy and her four children, put out its own statement after their husband and father’s arrest. They didn’t appear to have had any more grasp of his nature than did the strangers he’d been interacting with in cyberspace. Their remarks read:
“We, as a family, have followed the events of the last week in horror and dismay along with each of you. As each day has passed, the surreal events have built into a narrative that is almost beyond comprehension. While we do not discount the information that has and continues to come to light, we do not know the person whom we have read and heard about on TV…. [John Robinson is a] loving and caring husband and father…. We wait with each of
you for the cloud of allegations and innuendo to clear, revealing, at last, the facts.”
Robinson’s daughter Christy, who was a medical emergency worker and married to a police officer, was the most aggressive in her defense of her father. The young woman was about the same age as some of the females whom Robinson had allegedly killed. She attempted to ward off strangers who tried to visit her father in jail and apparently sent out e-mails that extended her dad the presumption of innocence in the face of countless media reports that portrayed him as the Internet Slavemaster who may have killed up to eight people. (Privately, officials in Johnson County wondered if he hadn’t gotten rid of some people whom they’d never heard of.)
Christy had an endless and unenviable task in front of her. Almost as soon as the news broke of Robinson’s arrest, the local and national press offered up stories detailing Robinson’s long criminal record and his more recent adventures into the world of on-line sex. As these reports filtered out into the metropolitan area, people rushed forward to talk about being wronged by Robinson down through the years, usually in financial ways. Some of them called the police, but others were too embarrassed to do so.
In recent years several famous murder investigations, including the O. J. Simpson case and the JonBenet Ramsey case, had generated oceans of conversation and speculation on the Net. Everyone with a computer and a modem could now play amateur detective in solving these killings, while instantly sending his or her opinions around the world. The Robinson case, the first major one with a tangible Internet connection, immediately set off a heated debate in cyberspace. The Kansas City Star, which took the lead in covering the arrest, set up a chat room where people could offer their views about Robinson and the murders. The dialogue centered not so much on his guilt or innocence as on alternative sexual lifestyles, which had received a lot of attention in the days following the discovery of the bodies. Some people who were a part of the S&M subculture insisted that Robinson’s behavior in no way reflected the ideas or actions of members of that group. Those in the S&M community in and around Kansas City were appalled to learn of Robinson’s activities. They adamantly denied that he represented anything about them and stated that they would have reported him to the authorities at once—if they’d only known what he was doing.
The key thing in S&M relationships, the posters said, was not danger but trust; you were able to enter into these situations and explore them because of the confidence and the belief you placed in another that you would not be hurt. It took more faith and more trust to do this, they suggested, than to engage in conventional relationships. In the wake of the discovery of the bodies at Robinson’s farm and in his storage locker, the Internet was proving to be an educational forum, and people logging on to the Kansas City Star chat room gave hints for avoiding trouble in cyberspace. The main one, underlined again and again, was to meet your potential partner in a safe and public setting before getting involved sexually—because you never knew who this person might be.
Some of those of who entered the Star’s chat room felt that anyone who was fooling around with sexual alternatives or with men like John Robinson was naive and inviting danger. Others said that they’d lost a relationship or marriage because their lover or spouse had hooked up with someone on-line. Others argued that these postings were nonsense because they’d developed good relationships from Internet contacts. And others accused some chat room participants of being Robinson family members in disguise, who’d logged on to explain or defend the accused man. Still others said that they’d known Robinson personally and he’d either seemed harmless or he’d swindled someone inside their own family.
The most intriguing posting came from a close relative of Suzette Trouten’s, who dismissed the notion that all of the victims in this case were either looking for trouble or were self-blinded or ignorant individuals. This poster contended that Suzette was not a trouble-seeker but an intelligent young woman who was not easily taken in. According to this person, Trouten had met Robinson at least twice before getting close to him, and the man had worked the situation diligently before Suzette had agreed to take up with him. Robinson was not an obvious deviant to be avoided, but a clever man with a remarkable ability to appear normal.
Following the opening of the barrels and the identification of the victims, almost all of the dead women were described by those who’d known them as smart and resourceful people. What they had in common was that they were looking for something—or someone—to remove them from their circumstances, and especially from the economic circumstances they found themselves in. They were searching for somebody who could rescue them and offer a fast escape into a different life. In the days and weeks after the bodies were found, the papers were filled with articles from psychologists and other experts about the dangers of hunting for romance on-line. Women from coast to coast were advised in the strongest possible terms to be careful when surfing the Net for love or other forms of support. It had taken a grotesque tragedy to bring these warnings to the surface. Cyberspace had a dark side that could no longer be denied.
While all of these activities were unfolding outside Olathe’s Adult Detention Center, Robinson sat in his cell and began devising his legal strategy for beating seemingly insurmountable odds. He was being charged with three murders in Kansas (of Lisa Stasi, Izabela Lewicka, and Suzette Trouten), plus three more in Missouri (of Sheila Faith, Debbie Faith, and Beverly Bonner). Chris Koster was also charging him with fifty-six counts of fraud and forgery linked to his financial scams in Missouri. As Robinson pondered the charges, the Burlington Northern & Sante Fe trains ran right behind the jail, blowing through town all day and all night long. The screech of the whistles startled some people and for others evoked freedom and movement. There was nothing like the sound of a train, especially at night, to make one feel lonesome or want to be someplace else. The constant whistles must have been maddening for Robinson, who had pursued his passions and his freedom so relentlessly. His uncounted hours of driving all over Kansas City, of cruising back and forth to his farm, of spending full days locked in conversation with women in cyberspace, of planning the next seduction, had suddenly ended. All he could do now was think and wait and try to come up with a way to win his trial. If he lost, he was looking at being the first person executed in Kansas since 1965.
Immediately after his arrest, he declared himself indigent and unable to afford legal counsel. All he had for income, he told the court, was a small government check and his wife’s salary. The court accepted this claim and appointed him a three-man team, headed by Ron Evans, from the Topeka-based Kansas Death Penalty Defense Unit. The lawyers in this office, as in other similar offices across America, did this kind of work exclusively and were often regarded as the best possible defenders of those being tried on capital murder charges. They were usually not only excellent at parsing the legal fine points of capital cases but had strong personal feelings against the government putting people to death. Robinson, by saying that he could not pay for an attorney to defend himself against the state of Kansas, was given three of them who were thoroughly committed to keeping him alive.
The arrival of the death penalty team indicated not only that Robinson would be well-defended during his trial—for free—but that he was focused not so much on winning his case as on what would happen if he was convicted. Often defendants bring in death penalty defense experts only after they’ve been found guilty; Robinson was effectively bringing them in right after his arrest. Because the case was so complicated, and because it had led to the creation of more than twenty thousand pages of documents and had potentially eight hundred witnesses, his attorneys soon asked for more time to prepare for the preliminary hearing. They also filed forty motions challenging the evidence against their client and questioning the validity of the Kansas death penalty law. The motions were heard in the chambers of Judge John Anderson III, the son of a former Kansas governor. He ran a no-nonsense courtroom that was committed to moving through the process as quickly and effi
ciently as possible, but even he would come to understand that nothing in this case would happen fast. And at times, it seemed that it wouldn’t happen at all.
First, Robinson’s lawyers sought a delay for the October preliminary hearing. It was pushed back to November 2000. Then they sought another delay and it was pushed back further, to February 2001. Despite these developments, Robinson did make an occasional trip from the detention center to Judge Anderson’s court. For these appearances, he donned a sharp blue suit and tie, looking like the legitimate businessman he’d so many times claimed himself to be. He sat quietly and calmly, gazing at the judge or the prosecutors or taking notes with a pensive expression. He grew paler and thinner, his hair going grayer and then whiter. His eyes seemed to retreat farther into their sockets. He revealed none of his gift for banter that had charmed so many people over the years.
He allowed no one in court to see his flash point of rage, which lay just below the surface of his bland expression or his smile. In an instant he could transform himself from a pleasant-looking businessman into a red-faced, foot-stomping boy throwing a tantrum. His fury emerged when he was surprised by someone (as Retia Grant had surprised him that day when he was digging a big hole in his barn) or when he came up against something he couldn’t control. Now, sitting in jail, he would try to devise a strategy to control and orchestrate the legal circumstances surrounding him. Now he would do whatever he could to delay the process. His penchant for busyness had a new focus.
Fighting Back
Anyone You Want Me to Be Page 24