Anyone You Want Me to Be

by John E. Douglas

  Some of the victims’ relatives had taken up one side of the chamber, while members of Robinson’s family were sitting on the other. The scene echoed the one described in In Cold Blood, the Truman Capote book detailing the murder of the Clutter family in western Kansas in 1959. Six years later, Dick Hickock, a native of Olathe, along with Perry Smith, had been hanged in Leavenworth.

  For five days, witnesses entered the redbrick courthouse in the Johnson County Square, while nearby bell chimes played Christian hymns and other innocent-sounding melodies. The juxtaposition of the graphic testimony and the strains of “How Great Thou Art” or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You” was startling. Many worlds were intersecting here at once, and this lent a surreal quality to the whole event. Lore Remington was the first witness, and her plain appearance stood in striking contrast to the gritty details of her testimony about the world of S&M. This wife and mother from Nova Scotia who looked as average and normal as Robinson, shattered all preconceptions about those who take part in the sadomasochistic subculture.

  While the journalists furiously took notes in stone quiet, the Robinson family members listened intently but showed no emotion, as if this information was completely foreign to the man they knew. This was the first time that Remington had ever seen Robinson in the flesh, and she tried to avoid his stare. Her voice was absolutely flat as she identified the on-line cowboy picture of Robinson that he’d sent out to so many women in cyberspace, but her demeanor was more forceful when she testified about having warned Suzette about mixing business with pleasure when she went to Kansas for what she thought was a new job. Remington conveyed the impression of someone having second thoughts about her Internet relationships. Courtroom observers couldn’t help asking themselves how much her husband and children knew of her double life.

  Carol Trouten, an aging blonde with a raspy voice, testified next, and unlike Lore, she could not suppress feelings toward Robinson. Her skin reddened with anger as she tried to make eye contact with Robinson, who turned away from her by scribbling on his legal pad. Suzette’s mother said that her daughter was “always on the computer,” but Carol admitted that she had no idea of Suzette’s involvement in S&M. The prosecutors asked Carol to identify pastel-colored stationery that she thought she was receiving from Suzette. As she left the stand, Carol gave one last, long look of revulsion toward the defendant, who remained impassive. Robinson, dressed in a dark business suit, looked extremely busy throughout the proceedings, just as he had once looked so busy at Santa Barbara Estates, as if he’d now taken on the new role of attorney. He acted as though he were engrossed in a business meeting.

  The only witness who took an opportunity to share her feelings about Robinson was Kathy Klinginsmith, Lisa Stasi’s sister-in-law. It was to her home that Robinson had come in a snowstorm in January 1985, so he could gather up Lisa and Tiffany and take them away from her relatives for the last time. Kathy told the court that she had been terribly worried about Lisa and the baby that day and she’d wanted to chase after them once Robinson had removed them from her house, but she was “too scared” to make a move. Back then, the defendant had called himself John Osbourne. When Paul Morrison asked Klinginsmith to identify the man who’d used that name in 1985, she stared right at Robinson.

  “He looks older,” she said, “but he still looks evil.”

  Following a brief appearance by mobile-home-park maintenance worker Carlos Ibarra, Nancy Robinson was sworn in. With her daughter Christy looking on, the sweet-faced blonde, dressed in a conservative suit, took the stand. After being told by the judge that she did not have to testify against her husband, she went ahead anyway. She did not look at her spouse of thirty-six years and was inscrutable. As she laid out the details of how Robinson had brought home an infant fifteen years earlier and asked her to take care of the baby, she identified Tiffany Stasi from a family photograph. Everyone in the picture, including Don and Helen Robinson and John Robinson, looked extremely pleased with the new addition. When she left the stand, Nancy acted as if she’d never seen her husband before. If she said nothing under oath that directly hurt her husband, she also offered nothing that helped him. She did not provide an alibi for any of the time frames around any of the crimes he was charged with committing. She was cooperative with the prosecution and looked stunned at finding herself on the witness stand. In time, her testimony would evolve.

  After testifying, Nancy sat in the gallery and listened as Vickie Neufeld was sworn in and recounted her sexual relationship with the defendant. Nancy, sitting just a few feet behind her husband, watched as the DA brought out the contents from the bag of sex toys that Robinson had taken from Neufeld: rabbit fur, anal vibrators, and riding crops. Nancy revealed nothing of what she was feeling as witnesses unraveled the endless list of things her spouse had done outside her marriage. The grislier the details, the more bland her expression became. The sheer variety of his lovers, as they came into the courtroom and testified, was remarkable. From Alecia Cox, the streetwise African-American woman who had managed to escape from Robinson, to Barbara Sandre, the Canadian who conjured up Tammy Faye Bakker, to the descriptions of the genital rings on Suzette Trouten and the gothic appearance of Izabela Lewicka, it was clear that Robinson’s tastes ran the gamut. He had been very busy indeed.

  But the most riveting testimony came from Vickie Neufeld and Jeanna Milliron, who had survived beatings by the defendant. Nancy Robinson absorbed the stories of how they had come to Kansas City looking for a relationship and ended up calling the police to file complaints about her husband. Both Neufeld and Milliron were graphic in their recounting of sex with Robinson. That Nancy could listen to all this may have given some hint as to why she had stayed in such a marriage for nearly four decades. Only someone with an extremely high threshold for denial could have endured this spectacle—especially in public. Even veteran courtroom officials were squirming at this testimony. During the breaks, women reporters gathered in the rest rooms and shared their astonishment at Nancy’s lack of emotion. Perhaps she was as numb as she looked. The female journalists were surprised at how cavalier some of Robinson’s sex partners appeared on the stand. Barbara Sandre, on the other hand, seemed angered and humiliated at how easily she had been duped.

  When the courtroom revelations became too intense and embarrassing for some of the legal support personnel, they tittered and blushed and made jokes to ease their discomfort. Olathe had never before been exposed to such a salacious event.

  At the end of the week, as a snow and ice storm descended on the metropolitan area, Judge Anderson ruled that Robinson had to stand trial on seven of the eight charges (Milliron’s assault charge was thrown out). At first it seemed the trial might get under way later in 2001, but John Robinson had never been predictable and jail hadn’t changed that. After numerous delays, the trial was set for January 14, 2002, almost a full year after the preliminary hearing, but this date would not be kept either.

  XL

  Robinson’s next legal move came in the summer of 2001 when he abruptly got rid of his stellar death-penalty team and hired a new lawyer. In mid-July, Robinson fired the three highly qualified attorneys who’d been representing him for the past year and brought in a young and untested Johnson County barrister named Bob Thomas. The thirty-year-old had graduated from the University of Kansas School of Law only a few months earlier and had virtually no experience in the courtroom. Before going to law school, Thomas had been a police officer in the Kansas City suburb of Prairie Village, where Robinson’s son-in-law Kyle Shipps was a detective. Thomas had been a friend of Shipps’s, but indicated that the two of them had never had a discussion about the Robinson case. If the defendant had been indigent at the time of his arrest, as he’d claimed to be, and if he hadn’t made any money from his cell during the past year, then one could only wonder where the money had come from to put Thomas on his payroll.

  With this maneuver, Robinson became the first death-penalty defendant in Kansas history to replace his
court-appointed lawyers with a privately hired attorney. The American Bar Association enforces strict guidelines for defense lawyers who work on capital cases, but Kansas itself had no such requirements for these attorneys. The ABA guidelines require that at least two qualified lawyers represent each death-penalty defendant and that both of those attorneys have at least five years of criminal defense work and have been the lead counsel in a minimum of nine jury trials. When Robinson brought in Bob Thomas, he’d been the head lawyer in only two cases and had no death-penalty experience. Thomas was an employee of veteran Olathe attorney Carl Cornwell, but the young man was apparently going to represent the defendant by himself, with no help from Cornwall.

  The arrival of Thomas into the legal mix threw the case into a quandary—and the strategy behind it seemed fairly obvious. If Robinson was convicted with Thomas representing him, he might later claim on appeal that he’d been denied a fair trial because he’d had inadequate counsel. Judge Anderson now had to decide what to do to avoid such a development, while the lawyers on both sides prepared to offer their opinions on the matter. Only one similar case had ever occurred—a murder charge in Georgia in which a judge appointed an older lawyer to aid a younger one, over the protests of the defendant. The man was found guilty and then appealed on the grounds that the appointment had been illegal, but the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the judge’s ruling and the conviction stood.

  At a hearing to debate the issue, Paul Morrison suggested that the court appoint another lawyer to assist Thomas, perhaps someone from the Kansas Death Penalty Defense Unit, because it was already so familiar with the case. When Judge Anderson asked the unit’s head man, Ron Evans, if this was acceptable, Evans said it was “not a workable situation” as long as Thomas remained the lead defense attorney. Because Robinson had hired his own counsel, Evans pointed out, this also meant that the defendant was not in fact indigent and therefore not eligible for legal representation by a state-financed office. The Kansas Death Penalty Defense Unit, which perhaps felt conned by Robinson into representing him for so many months, would have nothing more to do with the man.

  When the judge questioned Thomas about his ability to handle the colossal job in front of him, the attorney said that he planned to bring in four or five support personnel but intended to be the lead lawyer on the case. This information made the DA’s office nervous because it smacked of either the possibility of a successful appeal or a mistrial. The last thing that Morrison wanted was to have to try the Robinson case twice. His office now filed written arguments outlining their position that the court had a legal obligation to step in and provide the defendant with a veteran attorney. They cited both Kansas law and the U.S. Supreme Court, stating that they were aware of “no cases where a conviction has been reversed because of over-representation by counsel. We know of many convictions reversed because of under-representation by counsel, however.” Under the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, they said, “the essential aim…is to guarantee an effective advocate for each criminal defendant rather than to ensure the defendant will inexorably be represented by the lawyer whom he prefers.”

  In a strange irony of the law, the prosecution was seeking better legal representation for Robinson than he’d hired.

  The prosecutors said that the Robinson case would be “extraordinary in length, complexity and issues…. It is absurd to believe that the defendant has the wherewithal to fund effective representation in this case.” In papers filed in Johnson County shortly after his arrest, Robinson had listed his income as roughly $1,000 a month, while his wife grossed only about $700 a month (one could only wonder how he’d paid for all the motel bills, phone bills, computers, travel bills for various women, the farm near La Cygne, and all the other expenses that had kept his business fronts and sexual escapades afloat). In referring to Robinson’s known income, Morrison and Assistant DA Sara Welch said that they were primarily concerned that a conviction of the defendant would not hold up if he had only one privately hired lawyer because that was all that he could afford. They had “grave concerns about the ability to prevail on appeal if the defendant is convicted and Mr. Thomas is his sole counsel.” The right to “select counsel must be carefully balanced against the public’s interest in the orderly administration of justice.”

  A few days later, Judge Anderson concurred with the prosecutors’ opinion. After meeting with both Thomas and Robinson, the judge said that he found the latter to be somewhat indigent and therefore qualified to receive legal assistance appointed by the court. For his part, Thomas said that he was looking forward to getting some help. All of this inevitably meant that the trial would be delayed so that new attorneys could enter the case and aid the young lawyer. Despite the many complexities that had arisen, the judge was determined to plow forward as quickly as possible.

  “Make no mistake,” he said, following his ruling on bringing in more defense counsel, “this is not an invitation to delay this case.”

  In late July 2001, Judge Anderson did something unusual by reaching across the state line and naming a pair of experienced death penalty lawyers from Missouri to represent Robinson. Patrick Berrigan and Sean O’Brien now took over the role that had previously been played by the Kansas Death Penalty Defense Unit. Kansas had reinstated the death penalty in 1994, but Missouri’s capital punishment law had been in effect since 1970, so the duo were veterans of these legal wars. This ruling satisfied Paul Morrison and the case was back on course. Although the judge had hoped to start the trial on January 14, 2002, Robinson’s legal team needed more time to prepare his defense. After taking into account their request for another delay, Judge Anderson set mid-September 2002 for a trial date—and he intended that this one be kept.

  So did Morrison. At the end of 2001, when he was asked by the press about his New Year’s resolution for the coming twelve months, the DA said that he had only one hard-and-fast resolve for the upcoming year. He wanted to get John Robinson tried, convicted, and prepared to face the death penalty in Johnson County. That would make him a happy man.

  This kind of happiness would not come easily. The case had created a legal monstrosity that was equal to the monstrous charges the defendant was facing. In January 2002, Robinson’s lawyers conducted a phone survey in Johnson County to determine how the massive coverage of the case had affected the local population. They wanted to show that Olathe and surrounding residents were prejudiced against their client, and because he could not get a fair trial in this county, the court should grant a change of venue. Judge Anderson said he would take this under advisement. In mid-February, when it looked as if Robinson’s defense team was finally in place, the defendant lobbed another screwball at the legal system. Bob Thomas now asked to step down from the case because one of his previous clients had been in jail with Robinson and claimed to know hidden details of the case. Marvin Ray, a thirty-four-year-old convicted thief, had been in the Johnson County Adult Detention Center in 2001 and said that he’d received information from Robinson. In the summer of 2001, Ray sent the prosecutors a letter apparently offering to testify against Robinson and contending that he’d helped a man (someone other than Robinson) and a woman transport two female bodies from Topeka to the farm near La Cygne, in exchange for two pounds of crack cocaine. Thomas told the court that because Ray had once been his client, he might have to withhold protected information about him, and this could hamper his ability to represent Robinson.

  The judge listened to Thomas carefully but would not let this latest development knock the trial off course. If Thomas wanted to quit the case or if Robinson wanted to fire him because of his involvement with Ray, that was between the two of them. His Honor was ready to get this case in front of a jury, and that was going to happen relatively soon, unless something “extraordinary” occurred. In February, he ruled that the trial would go forward on September 16, 2002, and two weeks later he ruled that there would be no change of venue. Bob Thomas now left the Robinson defense team and Patrick Berrigan and Sean O’Brien t
ook over the case. Initially, because they were death-penalty experts, Berrigan and O’Brien had intended to handle only the sentencing phase of the trial, if Robinson was convicted and facing lethal injection. That plan had ended with Thomas’s departure. With the trial date only six months away, the two Missouri attorneys tried to manage the 21,768 pages of documents the DA’s office had produced on the case, the forty-seven videotapes, forty-five audio tapes, twenty CD-ROMs, and other pieces of evidence. It was an overwhelming task, and this was not the only death-penalty case that either of the lawyers was working on. During the spring of 2002, as Berrigan was trying to prepare for the trial, two of his other clients were executed in Missouri.

  To make matters even more complicated, some novel legal issues surrounding computer forensics had emerged following Robinson’s arrest. After sorting through the defendant’s ninety-one thousand computer files, Detective Mike Jacobson had given the Kansas Death Penalty Defense Unit the relevant data on CD-ROMs, with the understanding that the unit would purchase Encase, the software program utilized by law enforcement to conduct forensic exams. In January 2001, the unit was given this data on nineteen CD-ROMs, and the lawyers in Topeka intended to access it through the Encase 2 series of software. But then the unit was dismissed from the case and by the time the data had been transferred over to the new attorneys, the Encase 2 series had been upgraded to Encase 3, making the old software obsolete. To download the Encase 2 program, one needed a password that came from purchasing Encase 3. The upshot of all this was that the defense had not been able to access the computer evidence directly. In April 2002, Jacobson gave the new Robinson lawyers about a thousand pages of hard copy—including e-mails, Web sites, and photos—based on what he’d found on the hard drives. He’d deemed roughly one thousand of the ninety-one thousand files to be pertinent to the case and tried to provide the defense with a road map of his discovery.