The Voices of Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Class characteristics, like tire size and tread design, can indicate a specific manufacturer. By carefully comparing photographs, Woods determined that the tire tracks found at the Smith crime scene had identical class characteristics to Crump’s rear tires. He then analyzed the casts and the tires for individual characteristics like nicks, tread wear, or embedded pieces of gravel, all of which can make a tire track as unique as a fingerprint. On the right rear tire, Woods found what he was looking for:I found one area on the tire that had some cuts and nicks that I was also able to find on the plaster cast poured at the crime scene. I went one step further. I made a plaster cast of that area and recorded the same characteristics, so I was able to confirm that the tire impressions made in the cemetery came from the suspect’s right rear tire.

  On Saturday, February 7, 1987, Michael Crump went to the Tampa Police Department to ask about getting his truck back. But first, Detective Parrish had some important questions for him—about how a woman he had been seen with was found dead the next day, and why his tire tracks were found several feet from her body.

  Crump again denied knowing Areba Smith. He claimed that he had been working in the area and had cut through the cemetery the night before the murder. But, when the detective brought out one more piece of evidence in the form of Lavinia Clark’s driver’s license, Crump sensed that he had been caught.

  I picked her up because it started to rain and she wanted a ride to the Boston Restaurant and Sports Bar, at 9316 Anderson Road [about a 17-minute drive north from where her body was found]. During the ride, we discussed sex and we agreed on a price of ten dollars. She proceeded to give me a blow job. Then she became frustrated because I was taking so long. She pulled a knife on me, so I choked and killed her.

  —MICHAEL CRUMP

  Detective Parrish explained that, “He‘s a big guy, and he slumped his shoulders and looked down, which indicated to me that when I showed him the license it struck a nerve.”

  Crump then admitted picking up Areba Smith on the night in question. He claimed they fought and that she tried to stab him. He admitted that he had strangled her but swore it was in self-defense.

  To the detective, Crump’s version of her death could not explain away the restraint device found in his truck and the ligature marks left on the victim. The evidence pointed to a well-planned MO, one he had used before.

  Officers next questioned Crump about the murder of Lavinia Palmore Clark. He claimed that he had once picked her up, but she had left him within minutes. He said that he knew nothing about the other seven victims, but the investigators did not buy his weak explanations.

  On July 16, 1987, Crump was found guilty of the murder of Areba Smith. On March 31, 1989, he was found guilty of the murder of Lavinia Palmore Clark. He was sentenced to death, later to be reduced to life sentences.

  It was perhaps obvious that Crump would appeal against the death sentences on a number of grounds, which included the alleged wrongful admission of evidence by the state and the claim that he had committed murder while his mind was disturbed.

  Dr. Maria Elena Isaza, a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, spoke for the appellant. She had been provided with raw data and test results from a Dr. Berland, a psychologist who had examined Crump earlier. Then Dr. Isaza did three-and-a-half hours’ additional testing on her own.

  “Mr. Crump was more of a do-er than a thinker,” she told the Supreme Court of Florida. “His judgment was consistently poor. He had poor impulse control; he acted first and reflected later.” Adding that old mental defense chestnut: “Because he was not capable of much planning, if he killed someone, he would have done it on the spur of the moment.”

  The fact that Crump had murdered on at least two occasions, that he carried a garote type of device in his truck, and that he was suspected of at least another seven “spur of the moment” killings doesn’t seem to have affected Dr. Isaza’s opinion at all.

  Dr. Isaza further told the appeals court that Crump had grown up without a father figure, and “although he comes across as a very mean, tough, and intimidating individual, when you talk to him he has the capacity to be very warm and caring. He is only comfortable, however, when he trusts someone,” added the psychologist. “If he perceives a threat, he feels persecuted or exploited, and he anticipates that he will be diminished.

  “He is very sensitive to rejection,” Dr. Isaza continued, “and any criticism, especially from women. When he feels threatened, he may act in a violent way, impulsively and without reflection.” Dr. Isaza concluded that Crump suffered from “hyper-vigilance,” a sense of feeling threatened. She found some indication of sporadic hallucinations and of hearing “God voices” talking to him. He had difficulties—“a feeling of sexual inadequacy or a feeling that his manhood depended upon his sexual performance.” Her diagnosis argued that Crump’s symptoms were “precursors, or consistent with a paranoid personality disorder.”

  Yes, brother, you may live: There is a devilish mercy in the judge, If you’ll implore it, that will free your life, But fetter you till death.

  —ISABELLA TO CLAUDIO, MEASURE FOR MEASURE, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  According to Dr. Isaza, Crump was, “under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance at the time of the Lavinia Palmore Clark murder,” that his “capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform to the law was substantially impaired.” She opined that, if Crump was with a prostitute and it was taking too long, “this would trigger the impulsive reaction he suffered from . . . He would become delusional, believing that he was threatened, being abused, or mistreated.”

  And it is not as if using the services of prostitutes was a new experience to Big Mike, for he had used hookers since the age of 16. “I went with them ’cause I was shy and had difficulties establishing relationships with women,” he has said. He most certainly did, for he killed at least two of them.

  By now convinced that the murders were not premeditated, the court of appeals bought this entire mitigation package, hook, line, and sinker. With premeditation kicked out the window, they overturned his death sentences, replacing them with life with a possibility of him serving around 25 years. I will leave the last words to the prosecutor, who had this to say at one of the hearings:Michael Crump comes to you having been sentenced back in July ’87 for the killing of Areba Smith. You look at him today. You’ve observed his demeanor today. This man is undergoing the punishment of prison life. He appears to be prospering. Life in prison is just that. It’s life. You can read in prison. You can write in prison. You can make friends in prison. You have daily contact with other human beings. You can watch television. You can follow sports. You can follow world events. You have contact with people in the outside world. Life in prison is life. It’s living. And in prison, by serving a life sentence, you can hope. You can even hope that one day your sentence will end and one day you can be released.

  Lavinia and Areba don’t have such a hope. People want to live. Michael Tyrone Crump wants to live. Michael Tyrone Crump wants you to show him mercy and spare his life even more. He holds his life more precious than he holds the life of others. But, in the end, it is not you who are responsible for him. In the end, it’s Michael Tyrone Crump who’s responsible by his actions, and he alone.

  But, now to a really bad man indeed.

  CHAPTER 8

  JOHN EDWARD “J.R.” ROBINSON—SLAVE MASTER

  There are some of us who live in rooms of experience that we can never enter or understand.

  —JOHN STEINBECK

  I SUGGEST THAT JOHN EDWARD “J.R.” Robinson is one of them, for his overinflated ego has a front larger than any major Main Street department store. At face value, the facade is impressive, hinting at an honest deal to be had within. “Integrity” shouts at one peering through the glass windows, but it is not until one steps through the door and walks around the displays inside that one realizes, all that glitters is not gold.

&nbs
p; J.R. Robinson, the owner of the store, is the ultimate con artist. A self-proclaimed businessman, unqualified by anything beyond his own bravura, he is the “quack” of old, peddling phony medicines and goods at expensive prices, passing off “Mickey Mouse” Rolex watches as the real thing. And if you purchased an item from the J.R. Robinson store and complained afterward, would you get a refund? Don’t hold your breath.

  In a warped way, that is why I was attracted to J.R., the ultimate “I-don’t-give-a-fuck merchant,” a sort of homicidal Del Boy (a fictional confidence man in a popular British sitcom), whose history and character no imaginative screen writer could ever invent.

  For me, the challenge was to open up a dialogue with a heinous serial killer who had never before cooperated with an author, or pretty much anyone else for that matter. I didn’t expect him to admit to a single wrongdoing, either. You see, J.R. is “innocent,” or so he now says. And, actually, if the truth be told, I did not even expect a reply from my first letter to him.

  I want $400,000, although that amount may be adjusted, depending on need. My attorney will control all information and distribution of funds.

  —JOHN E. ROBINSON LETTER TO THE AUTHOR, FEBRUARY 20, 2008.

  Nevertheless, I baited my hook with all the goodies that this particularly nasty little man might find attractive, and then, like the ever-optimistic fisherman, I cast my line, waited, and waited, and waited some more. I guess that J.R. sniffed at my lure, swam around it a few times, and sniffed again. The temptation was too much for this murderous con man, for they say that the easiest person to con is the con man himself. J.R. took the bait and ran with it, and he ran hard. Then, like any fighting fish, once firmly hooked, he tried to spit the barb from his mouth. The shiny lure was not all that it appeared . . . all that glittered was not gold.

  For a short while, I had landed one of the most twisted serial killers in criminal history. Then he jumped ship, and the record of what happened is published here.

  John Robinson is like a bloated, blood-filled leech, and the heinous killer sweats hatred, the copious secretions dripping out of every pore of his aging skin. Having pleaded guilty to a number of shocking murders to escape the death penalty, John E. Robinson is now demanding $400,000 to prove his innocence. His letters, featured in this chapter, explain that if he is not funded, he will use college students to publish his poetry to raise the money.

  The bespectacled inmate squinting into the Olathe Police Department booking camera lens was that of a flabby-faced bank manager look-alike who sold his soul to the devil. This is John Edward Robinson, a depraved sex-sadist who tortured and murdered eight young women, then stuffed their corpses into steel drums to marinate in their own bodily juices until they were discovered by sick-to-the-stomach police.

  An outwardly honest businessman whose shady dealings had taken him to prison several times before, John Robinson has since admitted to five murders in order to escape the death penalty, and he has recently been charged by the federal authorities for committing murder across state lines. My question to him was simple:

  “John, can you please, please explain to me why the bodies of five women you knew very well ended up in steel barrels, three in your storage locker and two more on your land?”

  He replied, in a letter to the author, January 10, 2008:I received your January 2 letter. At first I was simply going to forward it to my attorney to place in the file of vultures flying overhead wanting to pick my bones for personal profit.

  With the aliases “Anthony Thomas” and “James Turner,” J.R.—as he is known to the few friends he once had—was born December 27, 1943 in Cicero, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago. Standing 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing 167 pounds, he is now balding with partially gray hair.

  Although he refuses to discuss even his childhood without receiving large sums of money in return (the aforementioned $400,000, to be precise), we know from official sources that he was one of five children in a devout Roman Catholic family raised at 4916 West 32nd Street, two blocks north of the site of the now-demolished Sportsman’s Park Race Track in Cicero. His father, Henry, worked as a machinist for nearby Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works manufacturing complex, and, although a nice enough guy, he was given to more than the occasional bout of heavy drinking.

  He [Robinson] didn’t talk a great deal, but when he did talk, it was to produce an effect that he wanted. He was shrewd. He was aspiring to more than he was capable of, quite frankly.

  —RICHARD SHOTKE FORMER EAGLE SCOUT PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER TO THE KANSAS CITY STAR

  John’s mother, Alberta, was a disciplinarian, the backbone of the family, and ensured that the couple’s offspring had a decent upbringing. Little else is known of her.

  At age 13, John became an Eagle Scout.22 In November of 1957, he was chosen as the leader of 120 Scouts who flew to London to appear before Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at a Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium. Therefore, I asked J.R. if he could tell me a little more about this memorable experience. His reply was: I have never discussed this with anyone before, and I will not discuss it with you now. This is very valuable information to me. Your British readers would be very interested in my appearing before the Queen. If you send me $500.00, I will give you the exclusive story, which you can sell to the media and make a lot of money.

  Three days later, I copied a press cutting of this Royal Command Performance from the internet, posted it to J.R., and at once politely declined his generous offer.

  What I also already knew was that backstage J.R. had chatted with Judy Garland and told British actress Gracie Fields that he planned to study for the priesthood. After the show, the Queen said to Judy, who had sung “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby,” “We missed you. Don’t stay away so long next time.”

  With that bit of trivia out of the way, it is known that Robinson was a motivated youngster whose ability didn’t match his drive. He told his peers that he was planning to become a priest and someday work in Rome, but no one, probably not even John himself, knows whether this was what he truly wanted to do with his life or was just his way of getting attention. Anyway, maybe the facts speak for themselves: As a freshman at Quigley Preparatory Seminary in downtown Chicago, he was a poor student and a discipline problem. He did not return to Quigley for his second year of study, and it is believed that he was denied admission as a sophomore due either to his academic or behavioral deficiencies.

  After high school, in 1961, Robinson went to the Morton Junior College in Cicero. Then he met Nancy Jo Lynch, whom he married in 1964. She was to become the mother of his children. They divorced on February 25, 2005, by which time Nancy knew of his many notable shortcomings: One of which was that he had never done an honest day’s work in his life, the other being that any young woman who fell into his clutches would, more likely than not, would end up dead.

  After their marriage,the Robinsons moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where J.R. attended a trade school to learn the radiology profession. True to form, J.R. never finished his training, but this did not prevent him from getting a job at a children’s hospital, where he papered the walls of of his office with fake diplomas and certificates. Based on his lack of skills with the infant patients, his colleagues suspected that he was either a fake or one of the most incompetent technicians ever to practice his craft. Although hospital staff remembered him as being a nice enough young man, they knew that in no way was he a certified technician.

  Josephine Bermel, who worked with Robinson, said that he simply couldn’t cope with young patients. “We had to teach him how to do things properly,” she said. This downright incompetence cost him his first job. He was 21 at the time, and his wife had just given birth to their first child.

  Undaunted by this setback, and using his phony diplomas and certificates, J.R. soon found work as a “certified” X-ray technician at a medical practice in Kansas City. Here, he was employed by retired Brigadier General Dr. Wallace Harry Graham, who, for many years, h
ad been the personal White House physician to President Harry S. Truman and his wife, Elizabeth.

  In the spring of 1944, as a member of the First Hospital Unit of the First Army, Captain (later Colonel) Dr. Graham had waded ashore at “Easy Red” Omaha Beach four days after D-day. With the battle raging just a few miles ahead, he treated the wounded in the thick of combat, and by nightfall his tents, with 400 beds, had taken in close to 900 wounded. Moving across France and Belgium, then into Germany, his unit saw some of the war’s most bitter engagements, including the Battle of the Bulge, where Graham was wounded. He was awarded the Bronze Star and other decorations, as well as medals from France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

  The Trumans were healthy. I felt like the country’s most disemployed doctor.

  —DR. WALLACE GRAHAM INTERVIEWED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

  While in the White House, Dr. Graham had a ground-floor suite of offices filled with the latest in medical technology. In addition to the President and First Lady, he also treated some of the senior staffers and later became a temporary Major General of the Air Force. He continued to look after the Trumans in their hometown of Independence, Missouri, after President Truman left office. When the 70-year-old president was rushed to Kansas City Hospital for emergency surgery in 1954, it was Dr. Graham who removed his gallbladder and appendix. He earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. He developed a lifelong interest in botany and also boxed. It seems that the doctor’s only misjudgment throughout his distinguished career was taking on John Robinson.

  Quite how Robinson managed to con his way into working for Dr. Graham as a lab technician and officer manager is a question for another day, because the doctor was patently no fool. Dr. Graham later recalled that he had been impressed with Robinson’s achievements as an Eagle Scout and his “extensive credentials” in radiology. Nevertheless, highly regarded in the community, Dr. Graham was a trusting man, so he turned out to be an easy mark for a pathological and plausible liar like Robinson.