Talking with Serial Killers: Dead Men Talking. Christopher Berry-Dee
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the internet. The first woman, Vicki, 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 find work in the Kansas City area.
Vicki arrived in Lenexa on 6 April and, while staying at the Guesthouse Suites, spent five days getting to know JR. 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. She was, in many ways, and obvious choice for Robinson… that is to say, she was vulnerable. She suffered from depression and a lack of meaningful companionship and was eager to change her life; she fell completely for Robinson’s ‘bull’. She returned to Kansas City 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.
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. When 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.
Vicki’s response was to report the matter to the police, and was astonished to learn that all of her phone conversations with JR had been tape-recorded from the outset.
A woman called Jeanne was the second of the two women, and she turned out to be the last one to fall foul 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 JR and was installed in an apartment at the Guesthouse Suites, who, by now, regarded Robinson as an excellent customer.
Later, Jeanne 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 Jeanne was ready, as instructed, when JR 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 JR 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 JR had left she 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 one John Robinson. Worried and distraught, she called the Lenexa PD, who, on hearing that JR was involved, gave her complaint the utmost priority.
The detective who arrived at the hotel in response to Jeanne’s call was David Brown, who had been investigating Robinson since the disappearance of Suzette Trouten for more than two months. Convinced that JR 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 the arrest of the man who had been the subject of their investigation into the unexplained disappearances of several women.
* * *
For decades, JR had been baiting traps for other people, killing eight of his victims. But on Friday, 2 June 2000, the traps he had set for his prey ultimately became his own trap. It snapped shut when nine police cars drove up to 36 Monterey Avenue, Santa Barbara Estates, and officers got out, surrounded the building and pounded on his door.
Detectives arrested John E Robinson and charged him with aggravated sexual battery and felony theft; by the end of the following few days he would have willingly have settled for such simple charges. Visibly shocked, JR was handcuffed and driven away to the red brick edifice which 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 for the Robinson home.
Inside, as well as seizing all five of JR’s computers and fax machines, police found a blank sheet of paper which had been signed by Lisa Stasi in January 1985, some fifteen years earlier. Along with this were receipts from the Rodeway Inn, Overland Park, which showed that JR had checked Lisa out on 10 January 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 mortify those who found it.
Although somewhat belated, the police investigation had been thorough and revealed all of the 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 rummaging through his storage locker in Olathe. Here, 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. Along with Suzette’s things, they located Izabela’s driving licence, some photographs of her, nude and in bondage, a slave contract and several BDSM sex implements. They also located a stun gun and a pillowcase.
The following day, Saturday, 3 June, another search warrant was issued. This time, cops 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 produced by decomposition.
After prising 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 nose-pinching procedures of photographing and fingerprinting the barrels before resealing them and marking them: ‘Unknown 1’ and ‘Unknown 2’.
Later that same 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 writer David McClintick, ‘It confirmed what I had always believed, but the move from theory to reality was chilling.’
At the time Haymes was learning of JR’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 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. DA Morrison was an influential figure and was given total cooperation in cutting through the red tape inevitable in jurisdictional issues negotiated between two states. Early the next morning, as a result of his discussion, he and a group of detectives from Johnson County arrived at the office of Cass County’s