Suzette was the youngest of a family of five children and, according to Carolyn Trouten, ‘She was a kind of a mama’s girl.’ While she was in Kansas, she phoned her mother every day, keeping her informed of how things were going and, although she 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. And he was, evidently, happy with her.
On 1 March, 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 her regularly.
Then Suzette simply disappeared. After not having spoken with her daughter for some time, Carolyn made a few discreet enquiries, then called the police.
Detective David Brown began an immediate and thorough investigation of the man whom he saw as the prime suspect, John Robinson. He obtained JR’s criminal record and contacted the Overland Park Police. The rap sheet acquainted him with the other reports of missing women and soon he saw the potential connection. After two detectives had spoken to Stephen Haymes, Robinson’s probation officer in Missouri, it became clear that they could possibly be investigating a serial killer.
David Brown instructed the Trouten family and a few other acquaintances of JR’s to tape their telephone conversations with JR and to pass to the police copies of all emails from him.
At the time that Suzette had been preparing to move to Kansas, JR, using the name James Turner, had established two more BDSM friendships on the internet. The first woman was a psychologist from Texas who had placed an advert on a BDSM site. She had recently lost her job and when JR became aware of this he promised to help her to find work in the Kansas City area.
Jeanne arrived in Lenexa on 6 April and, while staying at the Guesthouse Suites, spent five days getting to know JR. During that time she signed a 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 and JR told her to return home and prepare to move to Kansas City.
Jeanne returned for another long weekend in late April and it was then that she found that JR 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 brutalise her far beyond the limits she had intended. She later testified that he took photographs of her while she was bound and nude and hit her hard across the face. ‘I had never been slapped that hard by anybody before,’ she told the court. She also stressed that the photographs were taken against her wishes and despite her protests.
Fortunately for Jeanne, the promised move to Kansas never took place and she demanded the return of her sex toys, worth more than $500. JR chivalrously refused. Moreover, he threatened to publicly reveal the slave contract and the explicit, compromising photographs.
Jeanne’s response was to report the matter to the police.
Kate was the second of the two women, and she turned out to be the last one to fall foul of Slavemaster. She was an accountant and, after some weeks of preamble on the internet, agreed to become Robinson’s slave. In mid-May she journeyed to Kansas for a few days with JR and was installed in an apartment at the Guesthouse Suites.
Later, Kate recalled that on Friday, 19 May she received a phone call from Robinson telling her that he would be coming round 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 Kate was ready, as instructed, when JR arrived. Yet she wasn’t prepared for what actually happened. He walked into the room, grabbed her by her hair and flogged her brutally across her breasts and back. Like Jeanne before her, Kate was discovering that JR was interested in a much rougher relationship than she wanted. 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, Kate’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, Kate became hysterical and after JR had left she got dressed and made her way in tears to the reception desk. There she asked for the registration card and it was then that she discovered that her host’s name was not James Turner but John Robinson. Worried and distraught, she called Lenexa Police, who, on hearing that JR was involved, gave her complaint the utmost priority.
The detective who arrived at the hotel in response to Kate’s call was David Brown, who had been investigating Robinson since the disappearance of Suzette Trouten more than two months before. Convinced that JR was a killer, Brown was not going to risk leaving another woman in the position of being a potential victim. When he had heard Kate’s tearful story, he got her to collect her belongings together and moved her to another hotel.
The next day, Kate gave a full interview to Detective David 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 complaints and statements from the two women from Texas, Jeanne and Kate, gave the police the means to justify arresting the man who had been the subject of their investigation into the unexplained disappearances of several women. On Friday, 2 June, nine police cars drove to the Santa Barbara Estates in Olathe, where they surrounded 36 Monterey. There detectives arrested John E. Robinson and charged him with sexual assault – although by the end of the following few days he would willingly have settled for such a simple charge. Visibly shocked, JR was handcuffed and driven away to the Johnson County Jail. At the same time, police and detectives spilled from the eight other cars and began to execute a search warrant for the Robinson home.
Inside, as well as seizing all five of JR’s computers, the police found a blank sheet of notepaper which had been signed by Lisa Stasi more than 15 years earlier, in January 1985. Along with this were receipts from the Rodeway Inn in Overland Park which showed that JR had checked Lisa out on 10 January of that year, the day after she and her baby, Tiffany, had last been seen alive by the managers. However, those first scraps of evidence were only the tip of a gigantic iceberg: 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 revealed all property owned or rented by Robinson. Consequently, a second search warrant had been obtained for that morning and, as JR was being driven to jail, detectives were busy searching his storage locker in Olathe. There they found a cornucopia of items connecting him to two of the missing women, Izabel 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 found Izabel’s driving licence, 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.
On the following day, Saturday, 3 June, another search warrant was served. This time, the search team descended on the smallholding that the Robinsons 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 which had been produced by decomposition of the body.
The detective who opened the barrel, Harold Hughes, a forensic crime-scene investigator, turned his attention to the second barrel and prised open the lid. Inside, he found a pillow and 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, this one was immersed in the fluid resulting from its own decomposition. Hughes completed the customary 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 judgement of JR was vindicated. He later told David McClintick, ‘It confirmed what I had always believed, but the move from theory to reality was chilling.’
At the time that Haymes was learning of Robinson’s arrest, the District Attorney for Johnson County, Paul Morrison, was contacting his counterpart in Cass County, across the state line in Missouri, in order to negotiate the issue of another search warrant. Detectives had discovered that JR maintained a locker at the Stor-Mor-For-Less depot in Raymore, a Missouri suburb of Kansas City. Morrison was an influential figure and was given total co-operation in cutting through the red tape inevitable in issues negotiated between two states. As a result of his 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 killings was hidden in the storage locker in Raymore; he had paid to rent the locker with a company cheque, in order to conceal his identity.
At 8am on the Monday morning, Tracy served the search warrant at the storage depot and the Johnson County detectives were led to Robinson’s locker. 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 smell of decomposing flesh.
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, save for the three barrels. These were found to be standing on piles of cat litter; obviously a futile attempt by JR to reduce the smell that was emanating from them.
The first barrel was opened, to reveal a light brown sheet, a pair of spectacles and a shoe. When the crime-lab technician had removed the sheet, he took hold of the shoe, only to find that there was a foot inside it and 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 might corrode and give way, so a police officer was sent to a nearby Wal-Mart to buy three children’s plastic paddling pools and these were slipped underneath the barrels before they were loaded on to 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. Both women had been beaten to death with an instrument, probably a hammer, and had been dead for some years.
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 was that of a teenager and was wearing green trousers and a silver beret. Identification was not immediately possible and was going to take some days.
Over in Kansas, in Topeka, the two bodies found on the Robinson property were identified by a forensic odontologist as those of Izabel Lewicka and Suzette Trouten: both women had very recently been reported as missing and were easier to trace.
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 and the other was Sheila Faith. Sheila’s daughter, Debbie, who suffered from spina bifida, 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 was 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 14 January 2002, before being postponed until September of the same year.
Inmate # 00456690 John E Robinson is currently on Death Row, Kansas, although the state has not carried out an execution since 1976. His current photograph and other details can be found on the Kansas Department of Corrections website.
DARLIE LYNN ROUTIER: THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK
‘Here’s a mother who has supposedly been the victim of a violent crime. She has just lost two children, and yet she’s out literally dancing on their graves.’
DALLAS COUNTY ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY GREG DAVIS, LEAD PROSECUTOR IN THE DARLIE ROUTIER CASE
Often the internet’s link with a murder is not that it was trawled to find the victim; instead, it is exploited to rally international support for the convicted killer. Yet, when I see a glossy, constantly updated website dedicated to promoting a Death Row inmate’s innocence, I smell a rat. What is the need for this global exposure, and what use are the pleas for support? And, more often than not, donations are welcomed, of course.
These sites are always maintained by the well-intentioned anti-death penalty lobby, whose campaigning would be better served if they concentrated their efforts on genuine cases. In short, such websites seem redundant to me.
The thousands of people who visit them are mostly not professionals in criminology-related professions, so what of value do they offer in assisting a convicted prisoner to gain his or her freedom? Surely the inmate’s own attorneys are capable of presenting a well-balanced legal argument before the appellate courts without all the hysteria these sites bring with them.
As to the internet debate rooms that attach themselves to these cyberspace ventures like clams to a rock, more often than not they simply post the ramblings of the ill-informed.
All such websites, and Darlie Routier’s pages are not exempt, publish selective material favouring the prisoners concerned. Rarely, if ever, do they expose the full facts, so they are patently misleading: a smoke-blowing exercise designed to deceive otherwise honest, often gullible people into supporting a cause that has already been lost.
A glance at the self-serving site dedicated to Darlie Routier’s case alludes to ‘evidence’ that can prove this woman’s innocence of the stabbing to death of her two young sons. Documents and affidavits sworn by expert witnesses are listed. Case photographs of the badly injured Routier are also posted to gain public sympathy for the loss she has suffered: her freedom and the lives of her two children.
However, on closer scrutiny, the documents and ‘evidence’ contained within documents are revealed to be all but worthless, and nowhere do we see the horrific truth.
I have studied this website and I can state that there is nothing here that will influence a court of appeal, and it is this – not the general public – that will be the final arbiter. In addition, I will note, in the wider public interest, that, while the pro-Routier camp pours scorn on the police and trial court’s actions, the public prosecutor has remained admirably quiet.
But perhaps the website is of some value in that it brings to light many red herrings. For its content and raison d’etre confirm the manipulating, scheming persona of Darlie Routier. The woman is the mistress of homicidal trompe l’oeil, for, despite her apparent wide-eyed innocent charm, she is one of the most evil and cold-blooded child-killers of modern times.
This is the story of the dog that didn’t bark in the night, and it is a fascinating and educational one at that, for it confirms the widespread and perfectly reasonable suspicion that pure evil lurks within the web.
In approaching this case, we should step back and look at the crime in its entirety. However, given that this crime appears to lack a motive, this particular picture of homicide has many components missing; pieces that are invisible to the human eye. Locating them may solve part of the puzzle; interpreting them an
d fitting them into the empty spaces to complete the picture is altogether another problem.
But this is no daub we will study so intently. The one we are viewing is akin to one of the masterly works of the Dutch graphic artist Escher, who is renowned for his dreamlike spatial illusions and impossible buildings. Like the murderer in this chapter, he was a wizard at deceiving the eye.
The analogy between Escher’s mesmerising work and the case of Darlie Routier is apt, because here we have an enterprise that millions of American citizens agreed was complete, only to change their minds after a short time, so that they now argue instead that it is not. The US Criminal Justice system says that the guilty verdict is the genuine article, while a growing body of commentators have had second thoughts and now claim that the prosecution case fooled the eye, with the result that the verdict is a fake.
And it is for this reason that the life of a condemned woman hangs in the balance.
Most of my readers, particularly those with an interest in criminology and the criminal justice and penal systems, will know that many prison inmates, especially those convicted on overwhelming evidence and facing long prison terms, often appeal against their sentences using trivial issues in their attempts to overturn the sentence or have it reduced. They set their warped and deluded minds the task of convincing themselves, as well as one another, that they are innocent. In the end, so convincing are they that they are able to manipulate hordes of people into believing them.
Commentators on the serial killer Kenneth Bianchi, who continues even today to manipulate society, have termed his behaviour ‘fly-specking exercises’. Bianchi meticulously dots the ‘i’s and crosses the ‘t’s, looking for the smallest errors in his frantic yet pathetic efforts to gain his freedom.
We find exactly the same ‘fly-specking’ behaviour in the case of the cyber spider Darlie Routier.
Her conviction was seemingly watertight. Indeed, so strong was the ‘overwhelming evidence’ presented by the prosecution that the jury had no reservations whatsoever about finding Routier guilty of first-degree murder and the judge sentenced her to die by lethal injection.
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