BODIES IN THE BARRELS SLAYER
SADISTIC John Robinson wasn’t just a member of a secret sex cult, he was the organisation’s violent “slave master”. Robinson’s role was to lure unwitting female victims to illicit gatherings, where other associates could rape them. And, once the torture
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 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.
Chilling
“He’s just chilling. There are so many sides to him.
“There is the con man after money, there is the murderer, there is the sexual deviant and there is the cover-up artist… the lies, endless lies.”
Robinson, now 73, grew up in Cicero, Illinois, the middle child of five.
A success at school and a keen scout, he even flew to London with his troupe and performed on stage at the Royal Palladium in front of Queen Elizabeth II.
He was praised for his “scholastic ability, scouting experience, poise and engaging smile”.
At the age of 21 he studied medical X-ray technology, got a job as a lab technician and married Nancy Jo Lynch.
On the surface, he was enjoying the perfect life. But in reality, the 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
Council of Masters and began recruiting women to work there.
One was Lisa Stasi, a 19-year-old mum to a four-month-old girl, Tiffany.
Lisa had been taking refuge in a women’s shelter, having been beaten by a former boyfriend.
Posing as a charity worker, Robinson offered her a steady job and a roof over her head.
Lisa was never seen again.
In a frantic phone call to her mother, Lisa had whispered ‘Here they come…’ before the line went dead.
Adoption
Cruel Robinson then masqueraded as an “adoption agency” and “sold” Tiffany to a happy couple for £4,500.
By now he’d immersed himself into the BDSM scene and went looking for more female recruits while keeping various mistresses holed up at flats across Kansas City.
One witness, who testified in court, told how Robinson barged into her apartment, beat her across his knee, then inserted the barrel of his gun into her vagina.
He told her: “You’ve been a real bad girl. You need to learn a lesson. And if you don’t shut up, I’ll blow your brains out.”
Over the next few years, more and more women went missing, including Catherine Clampitt, 27, Sheila Faith, 45, and her daughter Debbie, 15, Izabela Lewicka, 21, Beverly Bonner, 49, and Suzette Trouten.
Robinson had become more and more violent in his sexual relations.
But everything changed in the spring of 2000 when a woman he met on the internet, known only as “Jeanne”, went to the police.
She’d been keen on indulging her passion for kinky sex, but was left crying hysterically when Robinson grabbed her by the hair, flogged her across her breasts and back, raped her, and then took photographs of her nude body.
Within minutes of Jeanne’s call to the cops, Robinson was arrested.
Armed with search warrants, police stormed his ranch in La Cygne. They quickly discovered the bodies of Suzette and Izabela, rotting in barrels.
Hours later, at a lock-up over the border in Raymore, Missouri, police uncovered more barrels, crammed with the decaying corpses of Sheila and Debbie Faith and Beverly Bonner.
All of them had died from several blows to the head before being disposed of.
By March 2001, Robinson was standing in the dock charged with three counts of murder, the only slayings they had enough evidence to pin on him.
Dr Thomas Young, the chief Kansas City medical examiner, told the court: “When they opened those barrels... I’ve been around a lot of homicide scenes before and I’ve smelled pretty old, decayed bodies, but they’d all been exposed to the open air. The bodies of these women had been locked in barrels, and, man, it was an extraordinarily vile stench… very uncomfortable.”
In 2002, Robinson was sentenced to death in Kansas for the murders of Suzette and Izabela, and life imprisonment for killing Lisa, a sentence that reflected the fact she’d been murdered before Kansas reinstated the death penalty.
Slayings
A year later, in a different Missouri courtroom, Robinson admitted his guilt in the slayings of Catherine, Paula, Beverly, Sheila and Debbie.
Confronted with the testimony of 110 witnesses and some 500 pieces of evidence, Robinson showed virtually no emotion throughout his two trials.
Prosecutor Julie Stegnall told the jury: “The defendant cried just one time during his whole trial.
“He didn’t cry when there was testimony about Lisa Stasi. He didn’t cry when there was testimony about Izabela Lewicka’s body being taken out of that barrel.
“He didn’t cry when there was testimony about Suzette Trouten, when her family testified, when her body was taken out of that barrel.
“He didn’t cry over Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith or Debbie Faith.
“He only cried for himself. That says it all. He doesn’t care anything about anybody but himself.
“Manipulation and deceit, they go hand in hand with the defendant throughout these last 20 years.”
One juror, Skip Skipper, said he would be forever haunted by the images of the dead women.
He winced: “The injuries were awful. It was like he took a hard-boiled egg and cracked it.
“I don’t think I’ll ever eat another hard-boiled egg.
“To think that their families thought they were being looked after, having the best time of their life.
“And there they were, out behind some shed, rotting in a barrel.”