Talking with Serial Killers: Dead Men Talking. Christopher Berry-Dee
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to submit candidates whom they felt would be suitable for the KC Outreach programme and, in early January 1985, he was contacted by the Hope House shelter, and put in touch with Lisa Stasi.
At this stage it is worth hitting the pause button and briefly examine JR’s modus operandi around this time. Here we have a pathological liar, convicted fraudster, embezzler, and priapic womaniser who cheated on his wife. Here is a man who has no conscience. A person who will stop at nothing to achieve his own ends; if this meant stealing from the mentally ill and deceiving decent members of the public, then so be it. Now we find him, once again, using bogus organisations to make contact with vulnerable women. He could trawl, with impunity, for young females, and any gullible single mother agencies would unwittingly provide him with his prey.
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Poor, uneducated and unworldly, nineteen-year-old Lisa Stasi was as pretty as a picture and real cute, with long, dark hair, and trusting eyes. With a four-month daughter called Tiffany Lynn, Lisa was homeless and living at the Hope House shelter for single women. Sadly, her marriage to Carl Stasi had fallen apart and he’d left his wife and baby to rejoin the US Navy, at the Great Lakes Naval Base outside Chicago.
Carl later testified that he’d met his wife through a friend. They had married in Huntsville, Alabama, in August 1984, where Lisa had been raised. Lisa was eight months pregnant at the time. ‘We were going to stay there and start our lives there,’ Carl Stasi testified in court, adding, ‘but I didn’t have no insurance and the baby was due and so we came back here [to Kansas].’
Tiffany Lynn was born a few weeks later at the Truman Medical Center, a hospital well known for its care of the indigent. Nevertheless, broke and without a home, the Stasis’ marriage quickly fell apart. ‘It was shaky,’ Carl explained. ‘I was irresponsible and I wasn’t working at the time. It was going downhill from there.’ He and Lisa separated in mid-December, with him returning to the Navy a few days after Christmas.
John Robinson, using the alias ‘John Osborne’, now arrived on the scene. Using his phoney credentials, he offered Lisa free accommodation and career training. He explained to her that this involved helping her to gain her High School Equivalency Diploma, after which he would arrange for her to go to Texas to train as a silkscreen printer. When she had completed her training, he said, there would be job opportunities for her in Chicago, Denver or Kansas City. In the meantime, her new mentor told her, he would not only pay for her accommodation and living expenses but also give her a monthly stipend of $800.
It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. The kindly benefactor took Lisa and Tiffany from the refuge to install them in Room 131, at a Rodeway Inn, a motel in Overland Park, telling her that she and the baby would be travelling to Chicago within a few days.
When JR left the motel, Lisa went to see her sister-in-law, Betty Klinginsmith, to discuss matters with her; she stayed the night. ‘I fed her [Lisa] and the baby. She slept a long time, she took a bubble bath,’ Klinginsmith recalled at Robinson’s trial. The following morning, Wednesday, 9 January 1985, Lisa telephoned the front desk at the Rodeway Inn to learn that an irate ‘Mr Osborne’ was looking for her. She left a message for Osborne with the clerk asking him to call her at Klinginsmith’s home. A few minutes later the phone rang and Betty gave Osborne directions to her house.
He [Robinson] came to my door about 25 minutes later, rang the doorbell. I went down to the door with my son, who was five. […] Lisa put on her coat. He didn’t waste any time on pleasantries. He didn’t say anything to me. He just stood there and looked at me.
After expressing anger that she had checked out of the motel, Robinson insisted that Lisa and her daughter leave with him immediately. There was a heavy snowstorm when Lisa carried Tiffany to his car, which was parked down the street. She left her own damaged yellow Toyota Corolla and many of her belongings behind. Like Paula Godfrey, Lisa Stasi was never seen again by her family.
Back at the motel, later the same day, Mr Osborne produced four sheets of bank notepaper, which he asked Lisa to sign. He also asked for the addresses of her immediate family, saying that as she would be too busy to write letters when she got to Chicago, he would write them for her, just to let her relatives know her whereabouts. Perhaps she resisted, but we do know that she telephoned Betty Klinginsmith.
‘I took it for granted she was at her motel,’ Betty would tell investigators. ‘She was crying real hard, hysterical. She was telling me that “they” said that they was going to take her baby from her, that she was an unfit mom. They wanted her to sign four sheets of blank paper. I said, “Don’t sign nothing, Lisa. Don’t put your name in anything.”’ According to Betty, the last words Lisa said were: ‘Here they come,’ before the phone was disconnected.
According to testimony given years later by JR’s wife, Nancy, he had brought the baby home that night. She recalled that it was, ‘snowing heavily’ and that, ‘the infant was not very clean and smelt badly. There was dirt under the child’s fingernails. Apart from some spare nappies, the baby had only the clothes she was wearing, and some baby food.’
The next morning, the 10th, Betty Klinginsmith telephone the Rodeway Inn, only to discover that Lisa and Tiffany had checked out and that the bill had been settled by a John Robinson, not John Osborne. She reported him to the Overland Park PD and the FBI.
That evening, JR’s brother Don and his wife Helen, who lived in metropolitan Chicago, received an unexpected telephone call from John Robinson. The childless couple had been trying to adopt a baby through traditional placement services for some years, and JR had previously told his brother that he had a contact with a Missouri attorney who handled private adoptions; that for an upfront consultancy fee, of $2,000, he could act as a liaison for Don and Helen. The trusting couple soon handed over the cash, which JR back-pocketed.
That was way back in 1983 and for the next two years Robinson put into place a plan to procure a child for his brother. If the scam was successful, he probably intended to expand it to ‘help’ other childless families realise their dream of adoption. Nevertheless, several times during the following months, Robinson put Don and Helen on notice that an adoption was imminent, but a child never materialised.
John’s crooked scheme required locating pregnant, single women and he knew exactly where to find them. Putting on his civic philanthropist façade, he approached local pregnancy programmes and social workers to alert them to a new programme, Kansas City Outreach, that he and several fanciful leading businessmen ‘from the East Coast’ had created to help single mothers.
Karen Gaddis was a social worker at the Truman Medical Center in the City of Independence, the county seat of Montgomery County, and she had previously met Robinson when he had been seeking referrals in 1984. He was looking for young mothers, preferably white women, who had no close ties to family members. He even showed Gaddis an apartment which he maintained on Troost Avenue, Overland Park. It was a place, he said, where the women would stay.
Gaddis knew Caucasian babies were valued on the adoption black market and, because Robinson couldn’t provide her with any paperwork about the programme, she didn’t refer any women to him. ‘I think he thought we were a real fertile ground for young women that nobody would be looking for,’ Gaddis told NBC’s Dateline when the Robinson story broke. Within days, however, Robinson was at Hope House, where he picked up Lisa Stasi.
A day later John Robinson explained to his brother that a new mother had committed suicide at a woman’s shelter and, for a further cash sum of $3,000 (payable to the imaginary lawyer) and their signatures on a adoption certificate (which was bogus), JR could hand the baby over to them.
On Thursday, 10 January 1985, Don and Helen Robinson flew down to visit Robinson at his Missouri home, where they handed over the $3,000, and were given extremely convincing adoption papers with the forged signatures of a notary, two lawyers and a judge. They were delighted with their new child, whom they named Heather. By now, of course, Lisa had been murdered, probably brutally raped, and it would be fifteen years before Heather’s true identity was revealed, and then in the most shocking circumstances; the man she knew as ‘Uncle John’ would stand in court accused of killing her mother.
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