The Voices of Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  As it was virtually certain that the barrels contained dead bodies, Tracy summoned his boss, Chris Koster, and the state of Missouri assumed immediate control of the crime scene. A new team of police investigators arrived, and the locker was emptied of all its contents except the three barrels. These were found to be standing on piles of cat litter, obviously a futile attempt by J.R. to reduce the smell that was emanating from them.

  The first barrel, a black one with the words “rendered pork fat” on the label, was opened by senior criminalist Kevin Winer. The contents revealed a body wrapped in blue-gray duct tape and a light brown sheet. There were a pair of glasses and a shoe. When the crime scene technician had removed the sheet, he took hold of the shoe, only to find that the foot was still attached to a leg. On the assumption that the storage depot wasn’t the best place to investigate the barrels and their contents, it was decided to reseal them and take them to the medical examiner’s office in Kansas City. This was not as simple as it seemed. There was a very real fear that the bottoms of the barrels were corroded and might give way, so a police officer was sent to a nearby Wal-Mart to buy three children’s plastic wading pools, and these were slipped underneath the barrels before they were loaded onto a truck.

  Back at the medical examiner’s office, the barrels were opened, and as expected, each contained the severely decomposed body of a female. Dr.. Thomas Young determined that the females had been beaten to death with an instrument, probably a hammer, and had been dead for some six years. Sheila Faith’s also had a fracture on her right forearm that was consistent with a defensive injury.

  The first body was fully clothed. The second was wearing only a T-shirt, and in its mouth was a denture, which was broken in two. Body three, that of a teenager, was wearing green trousers and a silver-gray beret. Identification was not immediately possible and was going to take some days.

  I was represented by court-appointed attorneys who did no investigation, hired no experts, tested nothing, and admitted in open court a day prior to my trial they had not read the discovery.

  —JOHN E. ROBINSON LETTER TO THE AUTHOR DATED JANUARY 24, 2008.

  Over in Kansas, in Topeka, the two bodies found on the Robinson farm were identified by a forensic odontologist as those of Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten.

  A few days later, with the help of another forensic odontologist, two of the bodies that had been found at the storage depot were identified. One was Beverly Bonner; the other was Sheila Faith. Debbie, who suffered from spina bifida and cerebral palsy, was identified as the third body by means of a spinal X-ray.

  The case against Robinson was beginning to assume a structure, although there remained the problem of jurisdiction in relation to which state, Kansas or Missouri, would be responsible for each murder. Eventually, it was resolved that Robinson would be tried first in Kansas, and the date was set for January 14, 2002, before being postponed until September of the same year.

  I resent the fact that people are now claiming that Mr. Robinson, either directly or indirectly, is a serial killer. As each day has passed, the surreal events have built into a narrative that is almost beyond comprehension. While we do not discount the information that has, and continues to, come to light, we do not know the person whom we have read and heard about on TV. The John Robinson I know has always been a loving and caring father.

  —Byron Cerrillo

  Public Defender for Robinson at his trial

  Suggesting that five decomposing bodies found in barrels could never indicate that his client was a serial killer, Byron Cerrillo seemed to have watched too many episodes of The Practice, a TV legal drama created by David E. Kelly based on the partners and associates at a Boston law firm. Nevertheless, with elements of kinky sex and infidelity, the trial was a sordid affair.

  Carolyn Trouten was forced to come to terms with her daughter’s bizarre sex life on the stand and, on October 14, 2002, jurors were subjected to a 40-minute videotape of Trouten and Robinson engaging in sadomasochistic sex. Early in the video, Trouten sat on the bed, looked into the camera and said to Robinson, “This is what you wanted me to tell you . . . I’m your slave . . . everything is yours.” Robinson replied: “The most important thing in life is that you are my slave.”

  All in all, the jurors were confronted with solid evidence that could only point to J.R.’s guilt. In counterargument, the defense team could only say that there was no physical evidence, except a few fingerprints, to link Robinson with anything connected to the bodies.

  Indeed, although J.R. grumbles and complains about the negligence of his trial attorneys, he was as guilty as sin. The court heard from Don Robinson, who testified about how Tiffany was delivered to him by his brother J.R., as well as from the notary public, the judge, and two lawyers, all of whom said their signatures on the adoption papers had been forged.

  DNA tests showed that Robinson’s saliva was on the seals of letters sent to Carolyn Trouten. A criminalist gave evidence that Izabela Lewicka’s blood was found in Robinson’s trailer in La Cygne and on a roll of duct tape of the same type used to bind some of the bodies.

  Suzette Trouten’s hair was also found in J.R’s trailer, and maids at the motel where she had been staying testified that the amount of blood on the bed sheets in her room was much more than they had ever encountered when cleaning before.

  Even Suzette’s prized Pekingese became evidence when a veterinarian testified that Robinson had dropped the two dogs off for boarding. The animals were later abandoned in the mobile home park where J.R. lived. (Dog lovers will be delighted to learn that Peka and Harry were later adopted from the Humane Society.)

  The pillowcase found in a barrel also formed a solid link between Izabela Lewicka and Robinson. Her mother had given her daughter some distinctive bed linen with a pattern identical in every single respect to the pillowcase that ended up in the barrel containing Izabela’s body. A former lover of Robinson recalled that J.R. had given her similar sheets, but she didn’t recall there being any pillowcases.

  Nancy Robinson talked of her husband’s philandering and how several times she wanted to divorce him but reconsidered because of the children. At the penalty phase of the trial, J.R’s family asked the jury to spare his life, but when the jury had reached a decision about his punishment, the Robinson family was nowhere to be seen.

  Nancy divorced her husband on February 25, 2005, and wants nothing more to do with him. In a letter to the author on January 10, 2008, J.R. writes:My family worked for two years to put together a team which included every possible requirement from database setup to forensic testing, most volunteers. Unfortunately, the actual cost budget put together was $2.5 million dollars, an impossible amount.

  In reality, Robinson’s family did zilch.

  In January 2003, Judge John Anderson III sentenced Robinson to death twice and handed down a life sentence for the killing of Lisa Stasi.

  With John Robinson sentenced to death row in Kansas, the state of Missouri was still prosecuting the three murders that had been committed within their jurisdiction. For his part, J.R. was more worried about being extradited to stand trial in Missouri, because that state was much more aggressive in using capital punishment than Kansas. In point of fact, Kansas had not executed anyone since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.

  Despite Robinson’s argument that his attorneys were all but useless, they negotiated tirelessly with Chris Koster, the Missouri prosecutor, who stood firm against their offers and tried to get Robinson to lead investigators to the bodies of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine Clampitt.

  Because he either could not or would not reveal where he had dumped the bodies, Robinson demurred until Koster and his team became convinced the women’s remains would never be found. Only then did Koster, with the permission of the victims’ families, agree to accept guilty pleas in return for life sentences without parole. J.R. would never be executed in Missouri.

  This was classic John Robinson. The guy was a gamesman
to the end.

  —DA PAUL MORRISON TO THE KANSAS CITY STAR

  In mid-October 2003, J.R., looking much older than his 59 years, stood before a Missouri judge and, in a carefully scripted plea, acknowledged that the prosecutor had enough evidence to convict him of capital murder for the deaths of Godfrey, Clampitt, Bonner, and the Faiths. He demanded the unusual plea agreement because an admission of guilt in Missouri might have been used against him in Kansas—Kansas prosecutor Paul Morrison said he wasn’t convinced the murders actually occurred in Koster’s jurisdiction—and nothing he said in Cass County, Missouri, resembled anything like a confession of guilt.

  Once again, J.R. gave no statement or even a hint of what prompted his homicidal acts. As the victims’ next-of-kin shared their feelings of anger and pain before his sentencing to life in prison in Missouri—should he ever complete his other sentences—he ignored them and stared straight ahead, oblivious to the hurt he had caused. His mind unable to empathize with them, Robinson appeared bored with the entire process. In this, the final time he was ever likely to appear in public, it was clear that the depth of their emotions was something he had never experienced and cared not a bit about.

  And, there is some good news, amazingly enough, after such a tragic account.

  On July 6, 2000, authorities located Lisa Stasi’s daughter, Tiffany, alive and living with Robinson’s older brother, Don, in Hammond, Indiana. Unaware that the adoption was not legal, or that the girl’s mother had been murdered by Robinson, whom the child knew as “Uncle John,” Don and his wife raised the little girl in a loving and normal fashion. At the time of writing, Tiffany is 26. She has been made aware of the true identity and fate of her mother and has since met her biological father.

  The deal this author offered J.R. was that he could write what he wanted to say in this chapter without edit. Indeed, my brief was that he could have his own book if he agreed. This was his chance, perhaps his one and only chance, to come clean, to atone for his dreadful crimes—and more importantly, to put the minds of his victims’ loved ones to rest and to give them closure.

  I also offered J.R. the opportunity to be interviewed by one of the UK’s leading television producers of documentaries, on camera, to say what he needed to say, to clear the slate as he saw fit.

  I have tried this approach more than 15 times over the years, and succeeded with 13 of America’s most notorious serial murderers. I have cleared up a number of homicide cases and other serious related offenses as a result. My books Talking with Serial Killers I and II testify to this success, as did my TV documentary series, The Serial Killers, which is still being screened several decades after the series first appeared on TV.

  My offer to J.R., however, included a proviso: that I would not change a word that he sent to me, providing that he told the truth and was up-front. He broke this agreement from the outset, so it now falls upon me to provide a summary of Mr. John E. Robinson; to provide a psychological profile, if you will, in the absence of any worthwhile input from J.R. Let’s visit the dysfunctional mind of John Robinson.

  J.R. has always imagined that he is more intelligent than anyone around him. It is an ego thing—a state of mind not uncommon among the more learned and intelligent of the serial murderer breed. But whereas a sane, intelligent person might learn from previous errors of judgment, alas, the true sociopath does not.

  J.R. is a true sociopath. He understands the difference between right and wrong, yet he carried on committing antisocial offenses, regardless of the pain and suffering he caused. Sociopaths—once labeled psychopaths—just don’t feel remorse for their actions. They simply don’t care.

  Like so many sado-sexual serial killers, John trolled for his victims. In a few instances he selected vulnerable women from places where women felt safe—in one case at least, a hostel for women in danger.

  John conned them.

  John abducted, used, and horrifically sexually abused them.

  John bludgeoned these terrified women to death before disposing of them as so much garbage, most of them in barrels, to decompose and rot in their own bodily fluids.

  That’s how this lowlife disposed of his victims. Some of the deceased have never been found, while other intended victims escaped by the skin of their teeth. If the truth were known, if law enforcement had not been on their toes when J.R. first appeared on their radar as a potential homicidal maniac, many more women would have been murdered.

  J.R. however, was also the first serial killer in criminal history to use the Internet, hanging out in S&M chat rooms like a deadly spider waiting to entrap his intended prey.

  But where did all this start?

  Unlike the majority of those who graduate into the serial taking of human life, John did not suffer from an abusive childhood. His folks were decent and hard-working, and followed the strong Catholic faith. There is no evidence whatsoever that he was inclined toward criminal activity during his teens. Then, one day in his twenties, he embarked on a series of frauds, becoming a plausible liar and a serial swindler who embezzled his employers and friends, even his own brother, out of considerable sums of money. He had suddenly metamorphosed into a real life Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and it was all about money, lots of it too!

  Simply put, John mutated. However, unlike a sudden change in a single gene, the whole genetic package of his make-up underwent a complete deviation into evil personified. The motive for his first murder was not sexual deviancy. J.R. needed cash, even if if it meant deceiving his own brother, Don, over the adoption of baby Tiffany. Here was a quick way to earn $5,000, and the disposal of the baby’s mother, Lisa, was merely a side issue. But there can be no doubt that having this young, attractive mother begging him for mercy turned him on. I think that the very act of control over Lisa gave him sexual pleasure. This control freak was then psychologically pressed to commit the most violent sexual acts on any woman who fell into his clutches. And, as most psychiatrists and psychologists might agree, once the pleasure/reward switch for certain actions has been flicked on in the human brain, it is almost impossible to to switch off. This state of mind is called “addiction.” Mesh sexual addiction into a sociopathic mind, and disaster is as sure to follow as night does day.

  Whatever the case, to satisfy his perverted cravings, J.R. soon graduated into trolling for sex by exploiting women who were lonely and dissatisfied with the dreariness of their day-today existence. He could smell them a mile off and was able to hone in on them with unerring accuracy.

  Your unwarranted accusation of attempted manipulation and flimflam pretty much says it all.

  —John Robinson in a letter to the author, March 4, 2008

  Here was John Robinson, “Mr. Flimflam Man,” who portrayed himself as a respectable businessman. A high achiever, the well-dressed, immaculately turned out “Man of the Year,” who used blatantly false credentials that had fooled even the distinguished former physician to President Harry S. Truman. What chance did vulnerable women have when confronted with the philanthropic generosity and charms of a man like John E. Robinson, a pillar of the community? The answer is, none!

  So, where do we go from here, bearing in mind that John is now locked up and will remain so until he dies?

  One might have thought that this man could one day tell us the truth of what happened—the total truth, without flimflam—and how he became one of the most heinous serial killers in recent history. God only knows how J.R. must feel about having deceived his loving wife of so many years. Regarding his doting children, is there any sorrow and regret? No!

  Does this man feel any remorse for his homicidal activities? I think not, and it is at this point that we return to his correspondence with the author.

  “Certified” radiographer; CEO of various companies and one of America’s pioneers in hydroponics; Man of the Year; wannabe St. Jude; philanthropist to the mentally disabled and young, homeless, disenfranchised women, John is certainly qualified to run a successful business—at least, this is what he would wish
us to believe.

  Of course J.R. is innocent of the crimes of which he has been found guilty by a jury—at least this is what he wishes us to now believe. Of course, he is even innocent of the murders he has more recently pled guilty to.

  His family supports him in proving his innocence—at least this is what John claims in his letters. And, let us not forget that he demands $400,000 to help him prove his innocence, and to further prove that he was inadequately represented at his trial, and that the prosecutor is a crook.

  Indeed, so plausible is John Robinson, it should be obvious to anyone reading this chapter that the man is a fucking saint; he should be released from prison immediately and showered with apologies for having been detained for so long. The American justice system should, without further hesitation, offer him substantial compensation for his troubles—well, that’s the least society could do for such a decent, homespun guy!

  “Don’t blow smoke!” J.R. demands in one of his letters to this author. “I don’t have time for meaningless delays. I don’t have the time or the funds to play games,” he says, while at once stating that it will take at least a year before he could even discuss his childhood, and that is after his attorney—no name or address given in his letters—receives funds to the not insubstantial tune of almost half-million bucks.23

  While demanding that the author and a TV production company dig deep to follow his every whim, he goes on to say—and bear in mind, he has already pled guilty to each murder:Next we will proceed to the expert phase. First to examine and evaluate documents, photos and testing. Then to complete the necessary testing that has never been done. Each step of the way, we will evaluate and adjust our investigation or approach as required. The proposed budget is fairly simple at this point but may have to be adjusted depending on need: