The Voices of Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Around Thanksgiving, 1997, Andrew e-mailed his daughter in Polish. “I write in Polish because I’m not 100 percent positive that your letters are coming from you,” he said. “As you know anyone could create an e-mail account and sign it as you. If you would telephone, I would feel much, much better.” Izabela purportedly replied, insisting that all further contact be in English.

  “I have told you I’m happy,” she wrote. “I’m well. I have a wonderful job and a wonderful man in my life who loves me. I want to be left alone. I don’t know how I can make it any clearer.”

  At J.R.’s subsequent trial for Izabela’s murder, a friend of the dead girl testified that Izabela had confided in her that she was going to do secretarial work for an international publishing agent named “John,” who was also going to train her to be an S&M dominatrix. Jennifer Hayes also told the court that Izabela was going to begin her sex education as a slave.

  In January 1999, J.R. moved Izabela into another apartment in Olathe. This was closer to his own home, which may account for his sometimes describing her as a graphic designer employed by his new internet company, Specialty Publications. On occasion, however, he is known to have referred to her as his adopted daughter, while at other times he described her as his niece.

  Then, in August 1999, Izabela Lewicka disappeared and was never heard from again. Police believe that she was killed and disposed of around that time. However, her parents continued to receive e-mails purportedly from their daughter up until Robinson’s arrest. In the final months, John said that she was always traveling in some exotic land. One of her last e-mails in the spring of 2000 said that she had just returned from China.

  Suzette Trouten

  We all finally find what we want and need and I found mine.

  —Suzette Trouten

  last e-mail to her friend

  The “Slavemaster” soon returned to the world of sadomasochistic chat rooms. He made contact with Suzette Trouten, a bored 27-year-old licensed nurse from Newport, Michigan, who lived a double life: nurse by day, submissive slave by night. A substantially built young woman with a mass of curly brown hair, Suzette, whose non-sexual interests were collecting teapots and doting on her two Pekingese dogs, pursued a highly active BDSM lifestyle, carrying on relationships with as many as four dominants at once.

  Suzette had pierced not only her nipples and navel but also five places in and around her genitalia, all to accommodate rings and other devices used in BDSM rituals. A photograph of Suzette, with nails driven through her breasts, had been circulated on the internet, specifically at www.alt.com, and would have acted like a magnet to J.R. Quite understandably, a relationship soon developed. In fact, J.R. was so enamored of his new, submissive friend that he concocted a very attractive job offer to entice her to fly down from Michigan for an interview. He paid for her flight, and when she arrived in Kansas City there was a limousine waiting at the airport to meet her.

  The job, J.R. told her, involved being a companion and nurse to his very rich, elderly father, who traveled a lot but needed constant care. He went on to say that his father did most of his traveling on a yacht and that her duties would involve her sailing with them between California and Hawaii. For this, she would be paid a salary of $60,000 and be provided with an apartment and a car. J.R neglected to mention that the only way to have contact with his father would be through the use of an Ouija board or a medium, as the old man had been dead for some ten years, and that any spare money he had left in his pocket while working as a machinist for Western Electric had been spent on booze. But as we have already established, J.R. was not a man to let such trivial details inhibit his grand design, so he gave Suzette to understand that the interview had gone well and the job was hers. She returned to Michigan and began putting her affairs in order before relocating to Kansas.

  While she was getting ready to move, Suzette spoke to her mother, Carolyn, with whom she was very close, telling her all about her new job. In fact she also gave her mother J.R.’s telephone numbers—providing police with a lead to follow when she later disappeared in March. She also discussed the job offer with Lore Remington, an eastern Canadian friend. The two women had met in a chat room and shared an interest in BDSM. Later Suzette introduced Lore to J.R. on the Internet, and they too developed a long-distance, dominant-submissive cybersex relationship.

  In February 2000, Suzette rented a truck, loaded it with her belongings, and headed off to her new life in Kansas City. She took with her clothes, books, her collection of teapots, and the two Pekingese, along with her array of BDSM accessories including whips, paddles, handcuffs, various lengths of chains, numerous items made from rubber, and just about anything else that a self-respecting, bona-fide BDSM enthusiast might care to invent.

  Lenexa is a busy suburb of Kansas City, lying west of Overland Park and north of Olathe, and it was there that Robinson took Suzette when she arrived on Monday, February 14, 2000. He had reserved accommodation for her, specifically Room 216 at the Guesthouse Suites, an extended-stay hotel, and he had generously arranged for her dogs, Peka and Harry, to be boarded at the kennels of Ridgeview Animal Hospital in Olathe. “They will be allowed to go with you on the yacht,” he explained, but the Guesthouse Suites didn’t allow dogs. This was patently untrue, because Guesthouse Suites did, and still does, permit pets.

  Almost immediately after Suzette had settled in, J.R. told her to get herself a passport, as they would be leaving in two weeks. He also produced a “master-slave” contract covering their BDSM activities, which she duly signed. Then, ominously, he got her to attach her signature to 30 sheets of blank paper and to address more than 40 envelopes to relatives and some of her friends. Just as he had done with other women, he told Suzette that he would take care of her correspondence while they were traveling, as she would be too busy to do so herself.

  Suzette was the youngest of a family of five children, and according to her mother, Carolyn, “She was a kind of mama’s girl.” While she was in Kansas, she phoned her mother every day, keeping her informed of how things were going, and although Mom had at first worried that she would be homesick, she seemed to be in good spirits and was certainly happy with her employer, John Robinson. Evidently, he was happy with her too.

  On March 1, Carolyn spoke to her daughter, who was looking forward to her impending yacht cruise with her wealthy boss and his father, and Suzette promised to phone Carolyn regularly. But she didn’t, and after not having spoken with her daughter for some time, Carolyn made a few discreet inquiries, then called the police.

  Detective David Brown began an immediate and thorough investigation of the man he saw as the prime suspect, John Robinson. He obtained J.R.’s criminal records, then contacted the Overland Park Police. The rap sheet acquainted him with the reports of other missing women, and soon he saw the potential connection. After he had spoken to two other detectives and Stephen Haymes, Robinson’s probation officer in Missouri, it became clear that he could possibly be investigating a serial killer, and a somewhat clumsy one at that.

  Detective Brown instructed the Trouten family and a few other acquaintances of J.R. to tape their telephone conversations with J.R. and to pass to the police copies of all e-mail from him.

  For several weeks after March 1, Robinson spent time contacting Suzette’s submissive friends and some of her relatives by e-mail, pretending to be her. Most weren’t fooled by the subterfuge. He soon dropped the act and set his sights on Suzette’s Canadian friend, Lore.

  Lore and another Canadian woman began their own amateur investigation of the man they believed was named J.R. Turner, and Robinson moved quickly after Lore told him she was interested in finding a dominant master for a friend. The e-mail and chat sessions turned to telephone calls, which were picked up by the police wiretaps now in place. The Lenexa Police Department contacted Lore and told her they were investigating Robinson. They did not explain the extent of the probe but asked her to continue the relationship.

  “The police didn’t tel
l me to get John Robinson to lure me to Kansas City,” Lore said later at Robinson’s trial. “I was willing to help.”

  Robinson made vague offers to Lore about meeting in her person. “He offered nothing other than I would be financially taken care of and never have to work,” she said.

  At the time that Suzette had been preparing to move to Kansas, the sexually insatiable J.R., using the name James Turner, had established two more BDSM friendships on the internet. The first woman, Vicki, was a psychologist from Texas who had placed an ad on a BDSM site. She had recently lost her job, and when J.R. became aware of this he promised to help her find work in the Kansas City area.

  Vicki arrived in Lenexa on April 6 and, while staying at the Guesthouse Suites, spent five days getting to know J.R. During this time she signed a slave contract in which she consented to “give my body to him in any way he sees fit.” They also discussed her working for Hydro-Gro before he told her to return home and prepare to move to Kansas City.

  Vicki, who suffered from depression and a lack of meaningful companionship, was eager to change her life, and she fell for Robinson’s lies hook, line, and sinker. She returned to Kansas City for another long weekend in late April, and it was then that she found that J.R. was eager to pursue more severe and violent forms of bondage sex than she wanted, but as she believed he was going to find work for her, she consented to his demands, allowing him to brutalize her far beyond the limits she had intended.

  Vicki later testified that he took photographs of her bound and nude, and he hit her hard across the face. “I had never been slapped that hard by anybody before,” she later told the court. She also stressed that the photographs were taken against her wishes and despite her protests.

  Fortunately for Vicki, the promised move to Kansas never took place, and she demanded the return of her sex toys, worth more than $500. J.R. refused. Moreover, he threatened to publicly reveal the slave contract and the explicit, compromising photographs.

  Vicki’s response was to report the matter to the police, and she was astonished to learn that all her phone conversations with J.R. had been tape-recorded from the outset.

  A woman named Jeanne, the second of the two women, turned out to be the last one to fall afoul of the “Slavemaster.” She was an accountant, and after some weeks of preamble on the internet, agreed to become Robinson’s sex slave. In mid-May, she journeyed to Kansas for a few days with J.R. and was installed in an apartment at the Guesthouse Suites, where by now Robinson was regarded as an excellent customer.

  Later, Jeanne recalled that on Friday, May 19, she received a phone call from Robinson telling her that he would be coming around to see her. During the call he instructed her that when he arrived she was to be kneeling in the corner of the room completely naked with her hair tied back.

  Submissive Jeanne was ready, as instructed, when J.R. arrived. Yet she wasn’t prepared for what would actually happen. He walked into the room, grabbed her by her hair and flogged her brutally across her breasts and back. Like Vicki before her, Jeanne was discovering that J.R. was interested in a much rougher relationship than she had anticipated. She, too, didn’t like being photographed during sex, but he insisted on doing so; he seemed excited by recording the marks his beatings made on her body. However, Jeanne’s genuine distaste for that level of treatment must have spoiled his enjoyment, because he told her he didn’t like her attitude and wanted to end their relationship. Her body burning and bruised from the flogging, Jeanne became hysterical to the extent that after J.R. had left she got dressed and made her way in tears to the reception desk. There she asked for the registration card and discovered that her host’s name was not James Turner but John Robinson. Worried and distraught, she called the Lenexa police, who, on hearing that J.R. was involved, gave her complaint the utmost priority.

  The detective who arrived at the hotel in response to to Jeanne’s call was David Brown, who had been investigating Robinson for more than two months since the disappearance of Suzette Trouten. Convinced that J.R. was a killer, Brown was not going to risk leaving another woman in the position of becoming a potential victim. When he heard Jeanne’s tearful story, he got her to collect her belongings together and moved her to another hotel.

  The next day, Jeanne gave a full statement to Detective Brown. She explained how she had met “James Turner” via the Internet and how she had been invited to Kansas to embark on a master-and-slave relationship. She told him that Robinson had beaten her with a violence far beyond her desires, explaining that she didn’t go in for pain and punishment or marks on her skin. “I’m a submissive, not a masochist,” she said.

  The statements made by Vicki and Jeanne gave police the means to justify arresting the man who had been the subject of their investigation into the unexplained disappearances of several women.

  For decades, J.R. had been setting traps for other people, baiting them, killing eight of his victims in the process, but the traps he set for his prey ultimately became his own. On Friday, June 2, 2000, it snapped shut when nine police cars drove to Santa Barbara Estates in Olathe, where officers surrounded 36 Monterey Avenue and pounded on his door.

  Detectives arrested John E. Robinson and charged him with aggravated sexual battery and felony theft, although by the end of the following few days he would willingly have settled for such simple charges. Visibly shocked, J.R. was handcuffed and driven away to the red brick edifice that is the Johnson County Jail in Olathe, where he was detained on a $5 million bond. At the same time, police and detectives from a number of agencies, including the FBI, spilled from eight other vehicles and began to execute a search warrant on the Robinson home.

  Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

  —JOHN STEINBECK

  Inside, besides seizing all five of J.R.’s computers and fax machines, police found a blank sheet of paper that had been signed some 15 years earlier in January 1985 by Lisa Stasi. There were also receipts from the Rodeway Inn, Overland Park, which showed that J.R. had checked Lisa out on January 10 of that year, the day after she had last been seen alive by the inn’s manager and her mother-in-law. However, those first scraps of evidence were only the tip of a gigantic iceberg of evidence; far more would come to light over the next few days, and it would horrify those who found it.

  The police investigation had been thorough and involved all of the property owned or rented by Robinson. Consequently, a second search warrant had been obtained for that morning, and as J.R. was being driven to jail, detectives were busy searching his storage locker in Olathe. There, they unearthed a cornucopia of items connecting him to two of the missing women, Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten. They found Trouten’s birth certificate, her Social Security card, several sheets of blank notepaper signed, “Love ya, Suzette,” and a slave contract signed by her. Beside Suzette’s things, they located Izabela’s driver’s license, several photographs of her, nude and in bondage, a slave contract and several BDSM sex implements. They also found a stun gun and a pillowcase.

  The following day, Saturday, June 3, another search warrant was served. This time the police descended on the small farm that Robinson owned near La Cygne. They found two 55-gallon metal barrels near a shed and opened one. Inside was the body of a naked woman, head down and immersed in the fluid that had been produced by decomposition of the corpse.

  After prying the lid off the first barrel, crime scene investigator Harold Hughes turned his attention to the second barrel and opened the lid of that one. Inside he found a pillowcase, which he removed to reveal another body. Again, it was that of a woman, but this one was clothed. Like the first body, it was immersed in the fluid resulting from its own decomposition. Hughes completed the procedures of photographing and fingerprinting the barrels before resealing them and marking them “Unknown 1” and “Unknown 2.”

  Later that day, Stephen Haymes, Robinson’s former probation officer, was told of the discovery of the bodies. After so many years of suspicion,
his judgment of J.R. was vindicated. He later told writer David McClintick, “It confirmed what I had always believed, but the move from theory to reality was chilling.”

  We started removing boxes from the front [of Locker E2]. After less than ten minutes there was a very foul odor that, with my past experience, I associated with a dead body.

  —DOUGLAS BORCHERDING OVERLAND POLICE DEPARTMENT OFFICER

  At the time Haymes was learning of J.R.’s arrest, the District Attorney for Johnson County, Paul Morrison, was contacting his counterpart in Cass County, across the state line in Missouri, to negotiate the issuance of yet another search warrant. Detectives had discovered that Robinson maintained a locker at the Stor-Mor-For-Less depot in Raymore, a Missouri suburb of Kansas City. Morrison, an influential figure, was given total cooperation in cutting through the red tape inevitable in jurisdictional issues negotiated between two states. As a result of this discussion, he and a group of detectives from Johnson County arrived at the office of Cass County’s Deputy Prosecutor Mark Tracy early the next morning. They carried with them the longest affidavit in support of a search warrant that Tracy had ever seen. It asserted that Robinson was believed to have killed several women and that it was suspected that evidence connected with the murders was hidden in the storage locker in Raymore. He had paid to rent his locker with a company check to conceal his identity.

  At 8 a.m. on Monday morning, Tracy served the search warrant at the storage depot, and the Johnson County detectives were led to Robinson’s locker—effectively a small garage with a brown lift-up shutter door. Inside was a lot of clutter, and the task force spent more than half an hour sifting through it before they saw, hidden at the back, three barrels. Wafting from the barrels came the nauseating, unmistakable stench of decomposing flesh.