Almost as soon as he’d set foot in the door, J.R. went about restoring the family fortunes. But there was never any real likelihood that he would stay on the straight and narrow for more than five minutes, so it wasn’t long before he was back to his unctuous ways.
By now the completely besotted Beverly Jean Bonner had left her husband and begun divorce proceedings. She told him that she was moving abroad and would set up a post office box number where he could send her the alimony checks. A few months later, she moved to Kansas City, where she went to work with J.R., who appointed her a director of his company Hydro-Gro. Not long after this grand appointment, Beverley’s alimony checks were finding their way into an Olathe post office box used by Robinson.
Sadly, Beverly Bonner was not seen nor heard from again afterJanuary 1994. Robinson placed her belongings into the storage locker in Belton, and later, when he was asked about Beverly by the storage facility staff, he said that the woman, whom he described as his sister, was in Australia, that she was enjoying herself so much “she probably would never come back.”
No one could have ever guessed that Mrs. Bonner was actually rotting inside a steel barrel in locker E2; that next to her decomposing corpse were two other 55-gallon barrels containing the remains of one Sheila Dale Faith and her daughter, Debbie, whose government checks also continued to supplement Robinson’s income.
Two of Beverly’s brothers received several letters from her beginning in January 1994. The first one was handwritten. In it, the recently divorced Beverly wrote that she had taken a new job in the human resources department of a large international corporation and would be training in Chicago and then traveling to Europe. In subsequent letters, all typewritten, she said her new job was wonderful and she was working with her boss, Jim Redmond.
Sheila Dale and Debbie Faith
Sheila was interested in BDSM [Bondage Domination Sadomasochism] and used the internet and personal ads to meet men. She would start to talk about BDSM, and I said, “I don’t want to hear it. It’s not my thing.”
—Nancy Guerrero, close friend of Sheila Faith
One of three sisters, Sheila Dale Faith, aged 45, was a widow. When her husband John died of cancer in 1993, she was left to raise their 15-year-old daughter Debbie alone. Mother and daughter had lived a lonely life in Fullerton, California, and Debbie, who suffered from spina bifida and cerebral palsy, spent her life in a wheelchair, having barely enough strength to manipulate the chair’s joystick controller. Tired of California, they moved to Pueblo, Colorado, in their beat-up white van.
As with so many thousands of lonely adults, Sheila began trying to meet a man on the Internet, and she made a number of bad decisions before making the fatal choice of John E. Robinson. Sheila told family and friends that she had met her “dream man,” John, who had promised to take her on a cruise. He portrayed himself as a wealthy man who would support her and Debbie, pay for therapy for the girl, and give Sheila a job.
One night in the summer of 1994, with no prior warning, “Dream Man” J.R. called at Sheila’s home, and took her and Debbie away to live in the Kansas City area. As was the case with so many other women who were befriended by J.R., the two Faiths were never seen alive again. When they did eventually turn up, they were in barrels.
Both of Sheila’s sisters received typewritten letters from Sheila and her daughter after their disappearance. “She always hand-wrote letters,” said sister Kathy Norman, who received correspondence postmarked Canada and the Netherlands. “This isn’t Sheila,” said another sister, Michelle Fox. “It was a happy letter, and Sheila wasn’t a happy person.”
The fatal fiscal attraction for J.R. lay in his knowledge that Sheila had been receiving Social Security Disability benefits for herself and Debbie. Now these payments were being directed to a mail center in Olathe, where they were collected by Robinson. In the autumn of 1994, according to court documents, Robinson filed a medical report to the Social Security Administration.
J.R. was not a man to be diverted from his schemes by the mere technicality of morbid deceit, and in the report he claimed that Debbie was totally disabled and would require care for the rest of her life, which, under the circumstances, was not strictly true. She was already dead. The report, however, allegedly bore the signature of William Bonner, the doctor with whom J.R. had been friendly when he was in prison and who until recently had been Beverly Bonner’s husband. When he was eventually questioned on the matter, Dr. Bonner categorically denied ever having met Sheila or Debbie Faith and had certainly never treated them. In any event, J.R. would continue to collect the Faiths’ disability checks for almost six years. In July 2000, Cass County prosecutors alleged that, between 1994 and 1997, Robinson defrauded the U.S. Government of more than $29,000 in Social Security and disability payments by forging documents to suggest that Sheila and Debbie Faith were alive.
It was also later proven that J.R. received more than $14,000 in alimony checks that should have gone to Beverley Bonner. Colleen Davis, the owner of of the mail center from which Robinson retrieved the checks, told police that she knew J.R. as James Turner.
If we are to give John any credit, and surely credit is due where deserved, we would have to say that at the very least, J.R. was going through a lifetime of psychopathologically determined trangressional retro-development with great consistency. In other words—words that John would understand—he was an out-of-control sado-sexual sociopath spiraling downhill fast. Indeed, at the time of writing, he still hasn’t bottomed out, as the following extract from one of the nutball’s diatribes to the author proves:You will have seen all the tripe published or on the internet. Eighty percent of which is grossly incorrect, exaggerated fiction with small tidbits of fact thrown in. For example the moniker given—internet slave master—hype provided by a prosecutor looking for votes and carried through to sell books and enhance TV ratings. According to reports I was an internet stalker who waited in “chat rooms” to locate victims. Great for publicity but factually incorrect and both the police and prosecutors knew it was a fabrication.
For the record, J.R.’s interest in sadomasochistic sex had continued to flourish, and he upped the ante by starting to place ads in the personal column of a Kansas City newspaper named Pitch Weekly. He met and had relationships with a number of women before he fell in with Chloe Elizabeth, who described herself as a businesswoman from Topeka, Kansas. She claimed that J.R. sent her a wealth of publicity material selected to show him in a good light. He included newspaper clippings describing his appearance before the Queen when he was a Boy Scout, his hydroponics brochure, details of his phony Man of the Year award, and a Kansas University brochure containing pictures of two of his children. It was altogether an odd portfolio for someone wishing to engage in a BDSM encounter—the term widely used to describe relationships involving bondage and sadomasochism. Unsurprisingly, J.R. failed to mention his lengthy and distinguished criminal record.
In later years, Chloe Elizabeth described an event that took place during the afternoon of Wednesday, October 25, 1995: “I was to meet him at the door of my house wearing only a sheer robe, black-mesh thong panties, a matching demi-cup bra, stockings, and black high heels. My eyes were to be made up dark and lips red. I was to kneel before him,” she recounted.
The red-blooded male reader would find nothing at all wrong with J.R.’s request at this point—indeed, there might be thousands of men who would applaud John for his imagination—but things later turned sour, for upon his arrival, J.R. took a leather-studded collar from his pocket, placed it around Chloe’s neck, and attached a long leash to the collar. After a drink and some small talk, he made her remove all her clothes except for her stockings and then took from another pocket a “Contract for Slavery” in which she consented to let him use her as a sexual toy in any way he saw fit.
“I read the contract and signed it,” said Chloe Elizabeth. “He asked if I was sure. I said ‘Yes, very sure.’”
With her signature on the dotted line,
he tied her to the bed, whipped her and carried out a variety of visionary acts on her breasts with ropes and nipple clamps. J.R. was in his element. Sweating profusely, he concluded their first date by making her perform oral sex on him. Chloe Elizabeth, it seems, was delighted with her “slave master,” and he was pretty much delighted with her.
“That was the first date,” she later told Robinson’s trial judge, who had been jolted from his slumbers by gasps from the stunned jury. “It was sensational!” she added. “He had the ability to command, control, to corral someone as strong and aggressive and spirited as I am.”
In any event, before the perspiring and head-to-toe-trembling J.R. left the house that evening, he told his new slave that she had been stupid for allowing him to do everything he had done to her. “I could have killed you,” he said with a smirk on his face.
For J.R., this master-slave contract with the amply proportioned Chloe Elizabeth had to be about as good as it could get, but she was not as naïve as he may have thought. Without his knowledge, she had taken the precaution of having a male friend stationed in another room of her house, listening vigilantly, upturned tumbler to the wall, for any sound of dangerously excessive behavior.
The relationship between J.R. and Chloe Elizabeth then blossomed, and they began meeting at least twice a week before it waned as she started to find out that Robinson was not all he claimed to be.
It is not unusual in BDSM relationships for the dominant partner to take control of the submissive partner’s assets, as in financial affairs—an arrangement that is sometimes included in the contract drawn up between slave and master. In Chloe Elizabeth’s case, she was required to sign over power of attorney to J.R. In return for sex, he promised to get her a job in the entertainment industry, for which he needed publicity photographs and her Social Security number. Like a good submissive, she should have followed his orders explicitly. She didn’t—and refused. The penny had dropped, as she now suspected that he was after her money.
If J.R. had imagined that Chloe Elizabeth’s submissiveness extended beyond her sexual inclinations, he was badly mistaken. She was an intelligent and successful businesswoman, not an ill-educated teenage mother desperate for help and support. Moreover, their relationship was now moving in the wrong direction as she found out more and more about him, and she started to voice her concerns to J.R.. Realizing that he was coming unstuck, he told her that he was going to Australia and would be away for some time—perhaps a very long time. However, she soon discovered that he had not even left Kansas. When she telephoned his office, the phone was answered but remained utterly silent. About an hour afterward, her own phone rang and she found herself being berated by a furious J.R. He accused her of checking up on him and warned her in very unpleasant tones against that sort of behavior.
The final straw for Chloe Elizabeth was when she found out about J.R.’s criminal record, and in February 1996, she ended their relationship.
Another woman [her name omitted for legal reasons] who entered into a master-slave contract with Robinson and struck a deal for financial support didn’t learn until years later how close she had also come to ending up in a barrel alongside Sheila and Debbie Faith and Beverly Bonner.
J.R. told this woman that he was divorcing his wife and that’s why he could never stay the night. He showered this “Ms. X” with gifts and clothes, but she soon noticed that most of the clothes he presented to her appeared worn. When she asked about this, Robinson said they were left behind at his office by former employees. Given that most of the clothes were raunchy undergarments leaves us begging the question, what on earth was going through “Ms. X”’s mind in accepting them?
This notwithstanding, the relationship was going fine until one day Robinson told her to get ready to travel with him. He was going to take her to London on an extended business trip. He told her that she should leave her job and advise friends that she would be gone for some time. She gave up her apartment, and Robinson moved her into a local motel. Like those before her, she was told she would be so busy that she should take the time to write letters to her family straight away—there would be no time while traveling. Robinson said that he would take care of her passport application, as he had friends in the U.S. State Department.
The woman thought it was rather strange when the day came for the pair to leave and J.R. turned up at the motel with his truck and a trailer loaded with clothing. What further concerned her was that he said that he was going to spend the night in the motel with her.
Nevertheless, excited at the thought of the trip, the woman awoke the next morning at 5 a.m. and roused Robinson. “He was like a man possessed,” she said later. “He jumped out of bed yelling at me and barely stopped berating me as he showered and dressed.” Still angry, J.R. said that he was going to to check her out of the motel and that he had errands to run. He told her that he would meet her at a nearby restaurant, but he never turned up. Confused and very disappointed, she tried to call him. He refused to take her calls. She persisted. When she finally connected with J.R., he said that he was unable to trust her and that the relationship was over. For some reason, he had gotten cold feet. But it wasn’t until Robinson was arrested for murder that the woman realized how close she had come to being killed that day. It is thought that J.R. brought his trailer as a means of of removing her corpse from the motel and, by rising before he did, she thwarted his plans. The motel being busy with guests, he would have preferred a quick and silent kill while the woman slumbered.
In pursuit of his sexual preferences, J.R. had by this time left the personal ads behind him and enthusiastically embraced the Internet. That same year, the Robinsons left the mobile home park and went to live on the Kansas side of the state line, near Olathe. The upmarket mobile-home development they moved to was called Santa Barbara Estates, where again Nancy worked as property manager.
Their new address was an immaculate gray-and-white mobile home at 36 Monterey Lane, and they certainly didn’t opt for inconspicuous anonymity. They erected a statue of St. Francis of Assisi in the yard in front of their home, hung wind chimes over their front door, and at Christmas, earned quite a reputation for their spectacular display of decorations.
As well as their home, which came as part of the perks of Nancy’s job on the Santa Barbara Estates, J.R. and his wife somehow managed to lease farmland near the small town of La Cygne, south of Olathe. They had about 16 acres that also contained a fishing pond to which J.R. invited his few friends from time to time. The couple improved the place by putting a mobile home there and erecting a shed on the site.
And it was at 36 Monterey Lane, using five computers and the handle “Slavemaster”—while at once trying to set up a legit wheeling-and-dealing website business—he spent a lot of time browsing BDSM websites. Ultimately, it would be two of his Internet contacts who would be instrumental in bringing his world crashing around his ears, but in 1996 that crash was still years away.
Izabela Lewicka
In 1997, Robinson encountered a young Polish-born undergraduate on the Internet. Her name was Izabela Lewicka, and the perky girl was studying fine arts at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Izabela’s parents became very concerned when, in the spring of 1997, she told them she was moving to Kansas, having been offered an internship. She wasn’t forthcoming with the details, doing nothing to allay her parents’ misgivings other than leave an e-mail and a contact address on Metcalf Avenue in Overland Park.
Her father, Andrew Lewicki [Lewicki’s last name is spelled differently from the women in his family because the suffixes of Polish last names depend on gender] and his wife Danuta attempted to talk Izabela, who had just finished her freshman year, out of leaving home.
“She was past eighteen,” explained Danuta. “She’s protected by law. We could not stop her.” So, in June, Izabela packed up her 1987 Pontiac Bonneville with books, clothes, and several of her paintings, then left Purdue for Kansas City. Her parents would never see
her again.
In August, when it was time for school to start, and after receiving no reply to their letters, the Lewickis grew extremely anxious about their daughter, so they drove to Kansas to find out what was the matter. They arrived to find that the address on Metcalf Avenue was simply a mailbox; their daughter didn’t live there. When they asked the manager of the place for Izabela’s forwarding address, he refused to divulge the information. Despite their anxiety, Izabela’s parents did not bother to contact the police but returned to Indiana. Shortly afterward, Andrew received an e-mail from his daughter: “What the hell do you want? I will not tolerate your harassment.” The e-mail said to contact her in the future at another address: [email protected]. When he later testified at Robinson’s trial, Andrew said, “We exchanged e-mail messages every couple of weeks. In most cases, it was her response to my e-mail messages.”
Izabela was, in fact, still alive at that time and living a life far removed from the one she had known in Indiana. And she had good reason to keep it a secret from her parents, for her new friend, J.R., had provided her with an apartment in south Kansas City, where they enjoyed a BDSM relationship. They even had a “slave contract,” one that contained more than 100 clauses governing their conduct—she as the slave, he as the master.
In return for her submission, J.R maintained Izabela financially, paying all her bills. When she wasn’t engaged in sexual activity with him, Izabela enjoyed the life of a lady of leisure. Her main interest was reading gothic and vampire novels bought from a specialty bookstore that she visited frequently in Overland Park. But she didn’t abandon her studies completely, for in the autumn of 1998, using the name Lewicka-Robinson, she enrolled at Johnson County Community College. Her adoption of J.R.’s name lends weight to reports that concluded the young woman believed they were going to marry—though he was 58 and she was only 18.
The Voices of Serial Killers Page 24