Nancy underlined the animosity between Robinson and his mother by saying that her husband didn’t even want to see his parents after the birth of his first child.
O’Brien questioned her in depth about March 1, 2000, when the DA believed that Suzette Trouten had been killed at the farm. Phone records had established that someone had made a call from the farm at 11:43 that morning. The prosecutors had used this phone record to conclude that Robinson had finished with the killing and was about to return to Kansas City to pick up Suzette’s dogs, check her out of the Guest House Suites, and put some of her possessions into storage. By October 2002, the authorities had spoken to Nancy a couple of times and had queried her under oath during the preliminary hearing twenty months earlier. During none of her prior discussions with the prosecution had she mentioned where her husband had been over the noon hour of March 1, 2000, but now she seemed to remember much more.
She told the court that at around 11:30 A.M. on the first, she’d noticed John driving by her office in his pickup to go get one of his grandchildren at school. When she went home for lunch that day, both her husband and her daughter Christy were there. Nancy also said that when she came home from work that evening, John had cooked dinner for her.
Her testimony stopped Morrison cold, and now it was his turn to try to keep his emotions in check. On his redirect examination of the witness, he questioned why she’d never before brought up seeing her husband with his grandchild around noon on March 1, 2000. How could she have suddenly remembered that today? Nancy was unflappable. She deflected Morrison’s inquiry and stood by what she had just said—just as she’d stood by her husband since the early 1960s. Morrison looked incredulous. His scalp had turned pink but he decided not to push her any harder.
It was the defining moment of the trial. It was also the defining moment of the thirty-eight-year marriage of John and Nancy Robinson. If a determined group of women—Carol Trouten, Lore Remington, and Tammy Taylor—had come together to work with the police to get Robinson arrested, the women in his family had now banded together to try to save his life. No matter what he’d done, Nancy tried to convey, his virtues as a father and husband had to count for something. While testifying, she indicated that she’d considered divorce back when her kids were small, but she’d never taken that option because her children loved their father and “wanted him back.” In more recent years, she’d thought about leaving him again, but she “never went through with a divorce because of our granddaughter.” What she’d learned about her husband since his arrest had apparently not diminished her feelings for him. She told the jurors that she “always loved him but I don’t understand this.”
Murders often produce an odd chemistry. It was impossible to say what John Robinson would have done or how his criminal career would have developed if his wife and children had left him back in the 1960s or 1970s. But it was possible to believe that his domestic stability and the love of his family had anchored him in such a way that he could be relatively normal at home and a monster in other places. It was possible to believe that he could go out and do horrendous things knowing that he could always return to those who perceived him as a basically good and productive man. It was as if he had to leave the house to express his violence so he could come back and be peaceful inside the home. Then the rage and violence would build up all over again, perhaps from trying to be a good husband and father. He was like a lot of men who don’t fit that comfortably into domesticity; his solution was not to leave the marriage but to kill. The two things—the outer world where he unleashed his rage and the inner world where he tried to be loving to others—were somehow kept in balance for many, many years. Each one fed the other until he was caught.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about Robinson was that everything people said about him was true. He may have been a good father and grandfather and an asset in the community with his involvement in civic affairs. He genuinely seemed to like children. He was a decent provider and his four kids had all turned out well. When they came forward after his arrest and said they did not know the person they were reading about on the front page of the Kansas City Star, they were likely telling the truth. If the crimes in the paper were horrifying, there was something equally horrifying about living this closely to someone for decades and never peeking through his facade. The man who was on trial for beating Suzette Trouten to death with a blunt instrument one March morning had gone home that day and made a nice dinner for his wife. He was considered an excellent baby-sitter for his grandchildren.
What was more terrifying than how deeply our own minds could fool us?
Nancy was not present for the trial’s most lurid part. On Monday morning, October 14, the prosecution presented the video of Robinson and Suzette having sex in the motel room, which had been seized during a search of his Olathe storage locker. The thirty-nine-minute film was not shown until after the prosecution and the defense had argued heatedly in front of the judge without the jury present. Ironically, Morrison and Welch only wanted the jurors to see six minutes of the tape. The defense countered by saying that the edited version was misleading and biased, showing their client in a highly negative light; if the jurors were going to see any of it, they should see all of it. After ruling in the defense’s favor, the judge announced that anyone under the age of eighteen had to leave the courtroom. The jurors were brought in, the lights were dimmed, and a screen was lowered right in front of the jury box and the defense table.
The tape began with a radio playing in the background in the motel room and a naked Suzette lying on a bed and penetrating herself with a buzzing dildo. The businesslike atmosphere of the courtroom had immediately shifted. It was as if everyone had been thrown into the middle of an XXX-rated theater. As the sex and the chatter unfolded in front of reporters, legal personnel, spectators, and one nun (there to support the death-penalty defendant), people had different reactions. The judge and all of the attorneys looked down, acting as if they were trying to take notes, but that’s hard to do in the dark. The journalists craned their necks to see everything on the screen. An elderly couple in the gallery stared at the screen with stunned expressions, and some jurors had covered their eyes. Even with eyes covered, one could still hear the echo of the buzzing dildo throughout the courtroom and the demeaning violence of Robinson’s words directed at Suzette, as he called her a “bitch” and a “slut” and a “whore.” As for the defendant, he now came alive with what seemed to be pleasure for the first and only time during the six weeks of jury selection and testimony. He leaned over in his chair as far as he could to get a better look at the action, and he appeared quite pleased with his performance.
Thirty-nine minutes is a very long time. Halfway through the tape, people were looking at their watches and doing other things to avoid the porn film. It was extremely strange to see the defendant prancing around nude, just a few feet from the jurors’ faces. When the tape approached its conclusion and the golf balls emerged from Suzette, this only added to the shock permeating the room. What made the scene even more surreal was that as the video neared its end and the sex finally stopped, everyone saw a fragment of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory pop up on the screen. Nothing could have underscored Robinson’s double life, as doting grandfather and sexual predator, any better. When the tape was at last over and the court took a recess, several women gathered in the rest room and reviewed what they’d just seen. A couple said they could only attribute the stamina of Robinson, who was fifty-six when the video was shot, to Viagra.
The next civilian witness was the deeply religious Retia Grant, one of Robinson’s neighbors at his farm. She was a great relief from the tensions and strain that had accumulated in the courtroom during the film, and she brought with her some much needed comic relief. In detail, she described how, in the fall of 1999, she’d inadvertently come up on Robinson in his barn when he was digging two trenches. She talked about how she’d startled him that day and the obscenities he’d aimed at her because of this.
Retia was moving along fine through her testimony until Sara Welch asked her to repeat for the jurors the expletives Robinson had used after she’d surprised him.
This was more than the devout Retia could do. She didn’t use that kind of language anytime or anywhere and she could only convey such thoughts by saying “blankety-blank.” She did this for the jury until Welch, who was not at all prissy, insisted that the witness be more explicit. When Retia still balked, Welch explained to her that this was the one and only time in her life it was not only all right to use bad language, it was necessary.
Clasping her hands in front of her as though she were starting to pray, the petite brunette looked up at the heavens and in her best Midwestern twang said, “Sweet Jesus, forgive me!”
The whole courtroom erupted into laughter and even the defendant got a chuckle.
Then Retia cut loose with the F-word.
All levity ended when the prosecutors introduced pictures and videos of Suzette and Izabela being removed from the barrels found on Robinson’s farm, as well as some autopsy photos. Once again, these images were strongly challenged by the defense team. Not only did they find them highly prejudicial, they did not want the jurors to have the option of revisiting them during their upcoming deliberations. Morrison countered this argument by simply saying, “Judge, as grisly as this may seem, this case is about dead women in barrels.” Judge Anderson concurred and allowed in some of the images, as well as others of Lewicka lying nude on green-and-maroon-patterned sheets in an apartment Robinson had rented for her.
The trial had already featured several disturbing moments, but nothing could quite match what the jurors were about to see. In the color video, it was jarring enough to watch the lids being removed from the barrels, but then came a direct view of the purplish, decomposing bodies. It was now clear why the lawyers, during the drawn out jury selection, had gone to such lengths to make sure that the people they picked had strong constitutions. Being on any jury is hard work; being on this one could have brought on recurring nightmares.
The autopsy photos were even more unsettling. The courtroom was dark and absolutely silent as still photos were shown of the two women after they’d been removed from the barrels and laid out on plastic sheets. Their bodies were yellowish and shapeless, their faces featureless, and they looked more like alien life-forms than human beings. A close-up showed Suzette’s head partially covered by a blindfold, and other photos showed both women’s peeled-back scalps, revealing the fatal wounds. The pictures reinforced the true brutality of how they’d died and the force needed to inflict such damage. During the display of the video and the photos, Robinson had no reaction at all. He too seemed totally numb.
The various images of Suzette presented to the jury were the most haunting of all. The juxtaposition of her nude body and lively, gregarious personality—as seen on the porn video—and her dead, shrunken figure lying on the plastic sheeting was alarming. The life force that had been so present in her one instant and gone forever the next conjured up the value and the fragility of every human being. In both the video and the autopsy photos, she was wearing the same nipple rings connected by the same butterfly pendant. Her life and her death could be felt by anyone witnessing these images. The prosecution had five other murder victims to focus on, but they built the bulk of their case around Suzette. Her story was more recent than any of the other victims’, and it was perhaps more poignant. In twenty-seven years, the one and only time she had left her mother and her home to wander out into the world on her own, she never came back.
Studying her pictures, the jury looked pale and grim.
XLIV
Morrison’s next legal maneuver was to roll the eighty-five-gallon yellow barrels into the courtroom on metal pallets and position them a few feet away from the defendant. This strategy was effective because the barrels stood in such sharp contrast to the subdued mauve colors of the courtroom and the dark suits of the lawyers. You could not stop looking at them, and the DA would leave them there for part of the duration of his case. In private, the two-hundred-pound Morrison had climbed into one of the barrels and had a female assistant roll him around in order to prove that a single individual could move a full barrel. Something about the yellow barrels standing naked in open court hour after hour could not be forgotten. They made a fantastic story extremely real.
Day after day, Morrison brought in a parade of criminologists and other expert witnesses to testify about the evidence recovered from Robinson’s home, his farm, and his storage lockers. They’d found his DNA on many of the pastel envelopes that had been sealed and mailed out to various relatives of the dead. They’d counted up the amount of money he’d taken from several of the victims over the years: he’d cashed alimony checks from Beverly Bonner worth about $14,000 and Social Security checks from Sheila and Debbie Faith worth about $80,000. The experts talked about how Izabela’s blood had been found on duct tape at the farm and on the walls of the apartment she’d occupied at Edgebrook. Suzette’s blood was positively identified on the wallboard in the farm trailer. Traces of violence had been left behind at each of the locations and were now presented to the jury.
After offering nearly three weeks of testimony, the state rested. For the past few days, the courtroom had been abuzz with what to expect from the defense. Would they bring Robinson’s children or at least his most loyal daughter, Christy, to the stand and have her talk about her father’s goodness? Would they bring Nancy back to bolster what she’d already said about her husband? Would Dr. Dorothy Lewis, the Yale psychiatrist who’d examined Robinson in September, be sworn in and speak to the jurors about child abuse in the defendant’s background and how this had led to mental illness? Or would Robinson’s lawyers save some of these witnesses in case their client was convicted on the capital charges and needed them to testify in the death-penalty phase of the trial? Would they then be used to ask the jury to spare his life?
In the end, the defense put up less of a fight than many people had expected, and after presenting only three insignificant witnesses, they abruptly rested. Maybe they’d decided to save their energy for the appeals process that would automatically follow a death-penalty conviction. Or maybe they’d felt, as they’d been saying for months, that they simply hadn’t had time to prepare for a trial this massive or to examine the mental health of their client in depth. Near the end of presenting his case, O’Brien again sounded this theme.
“We haven’t had adequate opportunity,” the lawyer told the judge, “to develop these issues.”
Then O’Brien added, “The jury will know nothing about how crazy this man is. He has been on suicide watch since the beginning of the trial.”
Once more Judge Anderson held firm, saying that Robinson had had plenty of time to get ready for trial. It had been his decision to change lawyers twice since his arrest, and he was the one responsible for all the delays.
Hearing this, O’Brien sat down and looked genuinely distraught. Like Berrigan and the other defense attorneys, he’d conducted himself well in tough circumstances throughout the long trial. He’d gently tried to raise doubts in the jurors’ minds and introduced them to the S&M subculture with sensitivity and discretion. He’d been polite, soft-spoken, and thoughtful with all the witnesses, even when they were severely damaging his case. He’d consistently acted as if he cared not only for the defendant’s family members, but for the defendant himself. On one occasion at the defense table, when Robinson’s suit collar had been ruffled, O’Brien leaned over and straightened it out, patting his client on the back.
It was standing room only in the courtroom for the closing arguments, and some people had to be turned away at the door. The gallery was jammed with journalists, spectators, Johnson County courthouse employees, law enforcement personnel, plus relatives of the victims and the man on trial. The barrels had been brought back into court and put up front, by the judge, where everyone could see them.
Morrison began by saying that it was hard to come up with t
erms to describe a man like John Robinson, but one that did fit him was “sinister.”
“Sinister,” the DA said, moving toward the big yellow barrels, “in that he’s JR, J. Osbourne, or others, always luring vulnerable people. Sinister, in that we’ve got rotting bodies in the barrels.”
As he said this last word, Morrison reached over and lightly tapped the lid of one barrel. The hollow sound echoed throughout the room and hung eerily in the air.
“Sinister,” he went on, “in that he took a baby from her mother, and sinister in that Sheila and Debbie Faith, in her wheelchair, were murdered and put into barrels. You wonder, did Debbie watch her mother get murdered?”
As he spoke, Carol Trouten, her ex-husband, Harry, and their daughter Dawn sat behind the prosecution table. On the other side of the gallery, Nancy Robinson’s two daughters, Christy and Kim, sat on either side of her. They stared straight ahead and Christy kept her arm around her mother.
Morrison began talking about Suzette and how in her diary she’d mentioned a fantasy of being blindfolded and serving her master.
“She’s a master’s dream,” the DA said. “You saw the tape…. If you want to put that tape in—it’s in evidence—close your eyes and just listen [to Robinson say], ‘Who owns you, bitch? Who owns you? You give your life to your master,’ as she sucks his penis. She was valueless to him.”
Nancy listened and did not flinch. Christy gave her mother a hug.
“Suzette wanted a twenty-four/seven master-slave relationship,” Morrison said, “but it’s hard to do that and to pretend to be a husband and grandfather. So what did he do? Killed her and put her in a barrel.”
The DA tapped the lid again and let the empty sound echo around the room. “Like a piece of valueless trash.”
The Trouten family absorbed the words and looked on the verge of tears.
Anyone You Want Me to Be Page 29