THE BODIES IN THE BARRELS SLAYER
MONSTERS OF DEATH ROW
FOR vulnerable and lonely women, it was simply an indecent proposal they could not refuse.
John Robinson posed as a millionaire on websites devoted to submissive sex, saying he was looking for a live-in ‘mistress’ – and he’d pay her £50,000-a-year.
One lady who answered the call in 1999 was 27-year-old care home nurse Suzette Trouten, the pretty owner of two beloved dogs who planned to use the money to finish her university degree.
Robinson even promised to put her up in her own apartment in Kansas City.
But Suzette’s dream of a life
HOUSE OF HORRORS: The ranch where the barrels were found of riches soon became a living nightmare.
Within a year she was dead, struck on the head by a large hammer – a blow so fierce it caused the bone to fracture and pierce the brain.
Suzette was found, like the other victims, upside down in a 55-gallon metal barrel near a tool shed.
She was naked and immersed in about 14 inches of fluid… the result of her own decomposition.
When Robinson was arrested in June 2000, his reputation as a respectable family man and business entrepreneur was shattered. Instead, he was cast as a sinister serial killer responsible for at least eight murders.
The Robinson family even issued a statement as this apparently loving husband and father was taken into custody.
They wrote: “We have never seen any behaviour that would have led us to believe that anything we are now hearing could be possible. 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. John Robinson is a loving and caring husband and father. We wait with each of you for the cloud of allegations and innuendo to clear, revealing, at last, the facts.” But for Stephen Haymes, one of the police officers who helped bring the murderer to justice, Robinson is simply an expert in deceit.
Haymes said: “I’ve dealt with a wide variety of characters, but never anyone like Robinson.
DEATH TRAPS: The women were left to rot in barrels technology, got a job as a lab technician and married Nancy Jo Lynch.
On the surface, he was enjoying the perfect life. But trouble simmered. In 1967, he was found guilty of embezzling £25,000 from his place of work by forging cheques.
He avoided jail but was placed on probation for three years.
He went on to get a job with Mobil Oil, only to be fired for stealing £5,000 worth of postage stamps from them.
Charged with theft, he moved to Chicago – where he embezzled a further £4,000.
He was jailed but emerged after just a few weeks and was released from his probation in 1974, two years early.
By 1976 he’d been fined £2,500 by a federal judge for yet MORE counts of fraud.
Robinson was now a pathological thief, who was somehow avoiding justice.
By the age of 34, Robinson was the father of four children and had moved into a plush nine-bedroom mansion in Kansas, setting up a hydroponics company specialising in growing vegetables indoors.
But, while some of his neighbours found him affable and intelligent, others worried about his ‘mean streak’ and quick temper.
He was controlling and was often heard screaming at his wife and kids.
And little did those same neighbours know that Robinson had set up another company. One which he used as a front to lure girls to their death.
In 1984 he handed a job to Paula Godfrey, a 19-year old who had just graduated from high school.
When she vanished, her parents called in police and a manhunt was launched.
When a letter seemingly written and signed by Paula arrived stating that she no longer wished to see her mum and dad, police abandoned their missing persons case.
But the note had been forged – and Paula is thought to have become Robinson’s first murder victim.
Her body has never been found.
A few months later, Robinson’s true personality started to take over.
Unbeknown to family and friends, he opened a brothel specialising in rough S&M sex.
He also became a leading member of a cult called the International