The first serial killer to use the internet as his hunting ground is now facing execution, but the full scope of his depravity may never be known. John Edward Robinson, an 82-year-old grandfather who once coached baseball and taught Sunday school, sits on death row in Kansas, convicted of murdering at least eight women. His crimes, however, stretch far beyond the bodies found sealed in chemical drums on his rural property.
Investigators believe the true number of victims is higher, and three women he killed have never been found. Robinson has refused to reveal where their remains are hidden, clutching that secret as his last shred of control.
The case against Robinson began to unravel in June 2000, when investigators from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office crossed a stretch of flat, open farmland in La Cygne, Kansas. The property was 16 acres, with a mobile home and a wooden shed. Just south of that shed, sitting out in the open as if they had been there for years, were two yellow metal barrels.
A cadaver dog had already alerted on them. Each barrel weighed 85 pounds and was sealed. When investigators pried off the first lid, the smell hit them before they saw anything.
Inside, curled up in a fetal position, was the decomposed body of a woman. She had been folded into the barrel like she was nothing, like she was trash. Her skull had been caved in by a blunt object.
Forensic examiners later determined the weapon was likely a hammer. They opened the second barrel and found another woman, in the same position, with the same cause of death: blunt force trauma to the head, from the same hammer, wielded by the same man.
Two days later, investigators crossed the state line into Missouri and searched a storage facility in Raymore, where Robinson rented two garages. Inside, they found three more barrels. The first was black with a gray lid.
When they opened it, they found a body. The two other barrels were wrapped together with plastic sheeting and held in place with duct tape. Cat litter had been sprinkled around the outside to absorb the dark fluid leaking from beneath the plastic.
Inside each barrel was another woman. Five barrels, five bodies. Five women who had been beaten to death, folded into chemical drums, and stored like forgotten inventory.
Some of them had been in those barrels for six years. The man who put them there was not hiding. He was not on the run.
He was living in a suburb of Kansas City with his wife and grandchildren, coaching baseball, teaching Sunday school, and spending his evenings in internet chat rooms under the name Slavemaster.
John Edward Robinson was 56 years old when he was arrested. He was a grandfather, a con man, a forger, a thief, a rapist, and the first serial killer in history to use the internet to hunt his victims. He is responsible for the deaths of at least eight women, but investigators believe the real number is higher.
Three of his victims have never been found. In one case, he did something that even investigators who had spent their careers studying violent criminals could not fully comprehend. He murdered a 19-year-old mother, took her four-month-old baby, forged adoption papers, and sold the child to his own brother.
That baby grew up 15 miles away from the man who killed her mother, calling him Uncle John, sitting across from him at family dinners, never knowing that the man carving the turkey had beaten her mother to death with a hammer.
To understand how John Edward Robinson became the man who stored women in barrels on his farmland, you cannot start with the murders. You have to start with the lies, because Robinson was a liar long before he was a killer. The lies are what made the killing possible.
John Edward Robinson was born on December 27, 1943, in Cicero, Illinois, a working-class suburb just west of Chicago. He was the third of five children born to Henry and Alberta Robinson. His father was an alcoholic who was physically abusive.
His mother was a strict disciplinarian. The household was not warm. It was not stable.
But from the outside, the Robinson family looked like any other blue-collar family in post-war Cicero. As a boy, John was active in the Boy Scouts. He was good at it.
He rose through the ranks quickly, and by the age of 13, he had earned the rank of Eagle Scout, one of the highest honors in the scouting program. In 1957, Robinson traveled to London with a group of Scouts who performed before Queen Elizabeth II. Backstage after the performance, he received a kiss on the cheek from actress and singer Judy Garland.
It was the kind of story a man could dine out on for the rest of his life. Robinson did. He told it to everyone.
He used it as proof that he was someone special, someone destined for great things.
But the reality was already diverging from the image. Robinson enrolled at Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago, a private school for boys who wanted to become priests. He lasted one year.
School records showed that he was a poor and failing student who frequently got into fights with his classmates and spent much of his time in detention. He dropped out. He then enrolled at Morton Junior College in Cicero to study radiography, the science of medical imaging.
He spent two years there and dropped out again without completing his training. By age 20, John Edward Robinson had failed out of two schools and had no degree, no credentials, and no clear path forward. But he had something else.
He had the ability to make people believe things that were not true, and that ability would define everything that followed.
In 1964, Robinson moved to Kansas City and married Nancy Jo Lynch. She was, by all accounts, a steady, quiet woman who wanted a family and a normal life. Their first child, John Jr.
, was born in 1965. Their daughter, Kimberly, came in 1967. In 1971, Nancy gave birth to twins, Christopher and Christine.
Four children, a wife, a house in the suburbs of Kansas City. To anyone looking in from the outside, Robinson had become exactly what he always pretended to be: a family man. But he was not a family man.
He was a fraud. By 1969, the first cracks were already showing. Robinson had gotten a job as an x-ray technician at a medical practice in Kansas City run by a physician named Dr.
Wallace Graham. He did not have the credentials for the job. He had forged diplomas and recommendation letters from Morton Junior College.
He told the practice he needed the night shift because he was attending medical school during the day. That was also a lie. He was not in medical school.
He was not going to be a doctor. He was stealing.
In 1969, Robinson was arrested for embezzling $33,000 from Dr. Graham’s practice. He was convicted and sentenced to three years of probation.
He was 25 years old, and it was the first time the justice system had a clear look at who he really was. They gave him probation. They let him walk.
The following year, Robinson violated his probation by moving to Chicago without his probation officer’s permission. He got a job as an insurance salesman at the R. B.
Jones Company. He was arrested again in 1971 for embezzling funds from that employer and was ordered back to Kansas City, where his probation was extended. In 1975, his probation was extended again after yet another arrest, this time on charges of securities fraud and mail fraud connected to a phony medical consulting company he had formed.
During this same period, while Robinson was being arrested and convicted and placed on probation over and over again, he was also building a public persona that was the exact opposite of who he actually was. He became a scoutmaster. He became a baseball coach.
He became a Sunday school teacher. He joined the board of directors of a local charitable organization. Then he forged letters from the organization’s executive director to the mayor of Kansas City, and from the mayor to civic leaders, nominating himself as the organization’s man of the year.
He hosted an awards luncheon in his own honor. The award was presented. Photographs were taken.
Hands were shaken. The entire thing, every word, every letter, every handshake, was built on forgeries that Robinson had created himself. He was named man of the year in Kansas City while he was actively on probation for fraud.
That is the level of deception this man operated at. He did not just lie. He built entire realities out of nothing, stepped inside them, and lived there until someone pulled the walls down.
No one pulled the walls down. Not yet. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Robinson continued his pattern of fraud and manipulation.
He created shell companies with impressive names that did nothing. He scammed investors. He embezzled from employers.
He was arrested, convicted, given probation, violated the probation, and was given more probation. The system kept catching him, and the system kept letting him go. Then, in 1984, Robinson did something new.
He stopped stealing money and started stealing people.
Paula Godfrey was 19 years old. She was from Overland Park, Kansas, and she was interested in building a career in business. Robinson offered her a job as a sales representative at one of his shell companies, a firm called Equi-2.
He told her he had arranged for her and a group of women to fly to San Antonio, Texas, to enroll in a clerical skills course. It sounded like a real opportunity. Paula told her family about the trip.
Robinson picked her up at her residence on September 1, 1984, to drive her to the airport. No one ever saw Paula Godfrey again. When her parents stopped hearing from her, they filed a missing persons report.
Police questioned Robinson. He denied knowing anything about her whereabouts. Several days later, Paula’s parents received a typewritten letter with Paula’s signature at the bottom.
The letter thanked Robinson for his help and stated that she was fine and did not want to see her family. The investigation was closed. Paula was an adult.
There was no evidence of a crime. The police moved on. Paula Godfrey’s body has never been found.
Robinson was just getting started, and what he did next was not just murder. It was something far more calculated, far more personal, and far more disturbing than anything that had come before. In November of 1984, John Robinson contacted a social worker named Karen Gattis at Truman Medical Center in Kansas City.
He told her that he and several Johnson County businessmen had developed a program to provide housing, transportation, daycare, and job training for young mothers and their babies. He said the program already had African-American participants and needed racial balance. He was specifically looking for a white woman in her teens or early 20s who had a newborn child, was struggling financially, and had no family support.
A social worker at a hospital listened to this request from a man with a criminal record for fraud and embezzlement, and she began making referrals. Robinson was not building a charity. He was shopping for a baby.
His younger brother Donald Robinson and Donald’s wife Helen lived in the Chicago area. They had been trying to have a child for at least five years and had been unable to conceive. At a family reunion in 1983, Donald and Helen told John they were pursuing a private adoption.
John told them he knew an adoption attorney and would handle the process for them. There was no attorney. There was no adoption agency.
There was only John Robinson building another lie out of nothing and waiting for the right victim to walk through the door.
Her name was Lisa Stasi. She was 19 years old. She had been born Lisa Elledge in Huntsville, Alabama.
She was, by every account, a southern girl with blonde hair and blue eyes who had married too young and found herself in trouble. She married Carl Stasi in August of 1984 and gave birth to their daughter Tiffany Lynn on September 3 of that year at Truman Medical Center, the same hospital where Robinson had planted himself with the social workers. By the end of 1984, the marriage had fallen apart.
Carl re-enlisted in the Navy and shipped out to Great Lakes Naval Base near Chicago. Lisa was alone with a four-month-old baby in Kansas City, with no money, no support, and nowhere to go. She moved into Hope House, a residential shelter for battered women.
That is where John Robinson found her.
He introduced himself as John Osborne. He told her about a program called the Kansas City Outreach Program that would help her get her GED, find a job, and provide her with housing and support. It must have sounded like a lifeline.
Lisa agreed to work with him. She told her family she had found a program that was going to help her get on her feet. Robinson placed Lisa and baby Tiffany at the Rodeway Inn, a motel in Overland Park, Kansas.
He paid for the room. On January 8, 1985, Lisa drove to the home of her sister-in-law, Kathy Klingensmith, to drop off Tiffany for babysitting. She told Klingensmith about Robinson and the program.
Klingensmith felt uneasy. Something about the arrangement did not sit right. Later that evening, Robinson called the motel and got Klingensmith’s address from the front desk.
He drove to the house. Klingensmith later testified that Robinson showed up at her door and said nothing. He just stood there and looked at her.
Lisa and Tiffany left with Robinson in his car, leaving behind some of Lisa’s personal belongings. Klingensmith watched them drive away. She later said she knew, deep down, that was the last time she would ever see Lisa.
Once back at the Rodeway Inn, Lisa made a phone call to her mother-in-law, Betty Stasi. She was crying. She was hysterical.
She said that they had told her Betty was planning to take Tiffany away from her because she was an unfit mother. She was terrified. That was the last time anyone in Lisa’s family ever heard her voice.
The next day, January 10, 1985, Robinson called his brother Donald. He told him a baby was available immediately. He said the birth mother had decided against adoption after delivery, but the family did not support her decision, so she left the baby at a shelter and killed herself.
Donald and Helen flew to Kansas City that same day. Robinson picked them up at the airport and drove them to his office, where they signed legal paperwork including a petition for adoption. The documents looked real.
Robinson had used the names of an actual lawyer, an actual judge, and an actual notary. Donald and Helen paid approximately $5,500 in supposed legal fees. They took baby Tiffany home to Illinois.
They renamed her Heather.
Investigators believe Lisa Stasi was murdered on or around January 9, 1985, the day before the baby was handed over. She was almost certainly killed with a hammer, the same way the other victims were killed. Her body has never been found.
In the days and weeks that followed, Lisa’s family received typewritten letters with Lisa’s signature claiming she had started a new life with Tiffany. Her mother said Lisa was not a big letter writer and she could not type. The letters were too clean, too polished.
They did not sound like Lisa. But without a body, without evidence of a crime, without anything to prove that something terrible had happened, the case went cold. John Robinson went home to his wife and his four children, knowing that his niece Heather, the baby girl his brother was raising 15 miles away, was the daughter of the woman he had beaten to death.
He would see that child at family dinners, at holidays, at birthday parties, year after year after year, for 15 years. He never said a word.
What Robinson did not know was that by keeping Tiffany alive, he had created the one piece of evidence that would eventually connect every crime he had ever committed. That revelation was still a decade and a half away. In the meantime, there were more women to find, more lies to tell, and more barrels to fill.
In 1987, Robinson lured a 27-year-old woman named Katherine Clampitt to Kansas City from Texas. Clampitt was desperate for a job, and Robinson offered her one at one of his management firms with the promise of travel. She left her child with her parents and moved to Kansas City.
She disappeared almost immediately after arriving. Her body has never been found. Robinson was not charged with her murder until the Missouri plea deal years later.
That same year, Robinson was finally sent to prison. Not for murder, for fraud. He was convicted on multiple theft and forgery charges in Kansas and later transferred to a Missouri facility for additional fraud convictions and parole violations.
He spent the next six years behind bars, from 1987 to 1993. But prison did not stop John Robinson from finding victims. It just changed where he looked.
At the Western Missouri Correctional Facility, Robinson met Beverly Bonner. She was 49 years old and worked as the prison librarian. Her husband was a prison doctor.
Robinson was charming, attentive, and full of promises. By the time he was released in January of 1994, he had convinced Beverly to leave her husband, divorce him, and move to Kansas to work for him. Beverly Bonner did exactly that.
She left her marriage. She moved to Olathe, Kansas. She signed over her alimony checks, arranging for them to be forwarded to a post office box that Robinson controlled.
Then she vanished. Robinson told Beverly’s former husband that she had moved to Australia. For years, Beverly’s mother continued forwarding her alimony checks to the post office box, never knowing her daughter was dead.
Robinson cashed every single one, nearly $1,000 a month, month after month, year after year, going straight into his pocket. Beverly Bonner’s body was found six years later in one of those barrels in the Missouri storage facility. She had been beaten to death with a hammer and folded into a chemical drum while still wearing cold weather clothing.
Robinson was not done. After his release from prison in 1993, he discovered something that would give him access to more victims than he had ever imagined. He discovered the internet.
In the mid-1990s, the internet was still new. Most people were just learning to use email. Chat rooms were unregulated.
There were no background checks. There were no safety protocols. For a man like John Robinson, a lifelong con artist who had spent 30 years manipulating people face-to-face, the internet was the most powerful tool he had ever held.
Robinson set up five computers in his home. He created multiple online personas, including Jim Turner and J. R.
But the name he used most often was Slavemaster. He trolled BDSM chat rooms and websites dedicated to bondage, discipline, dominance, and submission. He presented himself as a wealthy, experienced dominant man who could offer women a life of luxury, travel, and financial security in exchange for a consensual master-slave relationship.
He was none of those things. He was a convicted con man living in a trailer park. His wife, Nancy, was working as the manager of the trailer park to support the family after they lost their suburban home.
Online, Robinson could be anyone, and the women he met online had no way of knowing who he really was.
Sheila Dale Faith was 45 years old. Her husband had died the year before, leaving her alone to raise their 15-year-old daughter, Debbie. Debbie had spina bifida and used a wheelchair.
Sheila was lonely, grieving, and overwhelmed. She found Robinson online. He told her he was a wealthy man who would take care of her and her daughter.
He promised to pay for Debbie’s medical expenses. He said he would take them on a cruise. A friend in Colorado warned Sheila that it was dangerous to run off with a man she had met on the internet.
Sheila did not listen. She was excited. She packed up her life and moved with Debbie to Kansas City.
Sheila and Debbie Faith disappeared in 1994. Robinson had their social security and disability checks forwarded to the same post office box where he collected Beverly Bonner’s alimony. For the next six years, he cashed those checks every single month.
Investigators later calculated that Robinson collected approximately $97,000 from the Faith family’s benefits alone. Their bodies were found in barrels in the Missouri storage facility alongside Beverly Bonner. A mother and her teenage daughter in a wheelchair, beaten to death with a hammer and stuffed into chemical drums by a man who had promised to take them on a cruise.
In 1997, Robinson met Isabella Lewicka. She was 21 years old, a Polish immigrant and fine art student at Purdue University in Indiana. Her parents were both university professors.
Isabella was smart and creative, but she had developed an interest in the BDSM lifestyle and she found Robinson in one of his chat rooms. He offered her a job and a bondage relationship. He was convincing enough that Isabella dropped out of college, left her parents, and moved to Kansas City to be with him.
Robinson paid for her apartment. He gave her a job. He kept her close.
Sometime between 1997 and 1999, depending on the source, Isabella Lewicka disappeared. Police later found blood splattered throughout the apartment Robinson had rented for her. Her body was found in a barrel on Robinson’s La Cygne farm.
She had been bludgeoned to death.
Then came Suzette Trouten, the last victim and the one whose mother would finally bring John Robinson down. Suzette Marie Trouten was 27 years old and lived near her mother, Carolyn Trouten, in the Monroe, Michigan area. Suzette was the youngest of Carolyn and Harry Trouten’s five children.
She was a nurse who worked for a home health care company. She was also deeply embedded in the online BDSM community. She had her own BDSM webpage, traveled out of state for encounters, and had been trained as a submissive by a Canadian woman named Lore Remington.
Suzette met Robinson in a BDSM chat room. He told her he needed someone to care for his elderly father, who traveled extensively and required constant attention. He offered her a $60,000 salary and the chance to see the world.
It sounded too good to be true. Her employer in Michigan told her exactly that, but Suzette was drawn in. There was just one problem with Robinson’s story.
His father had been dead for years.
In February of 2000, Suzette packed up her belongings and her two beloved Pekingese dogs, Pica and Harry, and moved to Kansas. Robinson put her up in a motel room in Lenexa called the Guesthouse Suites. He had her dogs boarded separately, telling her the motel did not allow pets.
Then he made her sign dozens of blank sheets of paper and pre-addressed envelopes. He told her they would be traveling so much that he would handle her correspondence to family while they were abroad. On March 1, 2000, the day they were supposedly leaving on their trip, Robinson checked Suzette out of the motel and picked up her dogs from the boarder.
That same day, two Pekingese dogs were found abandoned at the trailer park where Robinson lived. Animal control was called. The dogs were taken in and adopted out to a local family.
Suzette Trouten was never seen alive again.
Suzette’s mother was not like the families of Robinson’s earlier victims. Carolyn Trouten was relentless. She and Suzette had spoken by phone nearly every day.
When the calls stopped, Carolyn knew something was wrong. She started receiving letters and emails supposedly from Suzette, but they did not sound right. The spelling was too perfect.
Suzette was a poor speller who never typed letters to her family. In one of the letters, the name of one of her dogs was misspelled. Suzette would never have gotten her dogs’ names wrong.
Carolyn called the phone number Suzette had left behind and was surprised when Robinson himself answered. He told her Suzette had run off with an acquaintance and stolen money from him. Carolyn did not believe a word of it.
She filed a missing persons report with the Lenexa Police Department, and this time the case landed on the desk of someone who would not let it go.
Detective David Brown of the Lenexa Police Department had been investigating online crimes during the late 1990s. He understood the internet. He understood how predators use chat rooms.
When Suzette Trouten’s disappearance was reported and Robinson’s name came up, Brown started digging. What he found was a trail of missing women stretching back 16 years. Paula Godfrey, Lisa Stasi, Katherine Clampitt, Beverly Bonner, Sheila and Debbie Faith, Isabella Lewicka, and now Suzette Trouten.
All connected to the same man. All disappeared under similar circumstances. All had received promises of jobs, money, or relationships.
All had vanished. In every case, their families had received typewritten letters claiming the women were fine and did not want to be contacted.
Brown assembled a multi-jurisdictional task force. They contacted Missouri parole officer Steve Haynes, who had investigated Robinson back in 1985 after Lisa Stasi’s disappearance and had been suspicious of him for years. Haynes told the detectives everything he knew.
He told them about the lies, the shell companies, the missing women, and the judges who had let Robinson walk free. Brown listened and understood the mistakes that had been made in the past. Previous departments had taken Robinson too lightly.
Brown was not going to make the same mistake. The task force took a different approach. Instead of confronting Robinson directly, they watched him.
They surveilled his home. They went through his trash. They tapped his phone.
They monitored his online activity. They used Carolyn Trouten as an intermediary, having her continue calling Robinson while police recorded the conversations. In one of those recorded calls, Robinson told Carolyn not to worry.
He said Suzette was on a boat somewhere and it was hard to call. When Carolyn told him she was thinking about calling the police, Robinson told her he really would not worry about it too much and that Suzette would probably send a card or an email when they hit the next place.
The task force tracked down Suzette’s Pekingese dogs. A detective visited the family who had adopted one of them and called the dog by name, Pica. The dog’s ears perked up.
His tail started wagging. He ran to the detective. At that moment, investigators knew the dog belonged to Suzette Trouten.
If her dogs had been abandoned at Robinson’s trailer park on the same day she was supposed to leave on a trip, then Suzette had not gone anywhere. She was dead. Around the same time, two other women came forward with complaints against Robinson.
Both had met him in BDSM chat rooms. Both had traveled to Kansas to meet him. Both described encounters that crossed the line from consensual BDSM into genuine violence.
One woman, Vicki Neufeld, reported that Robinson had stolen $700 worth of her belongings. Another woman reported sexual battery. These complaints gave investigators the probable cause they needed.
On June 2, 2000, police arrested John Edward Robinson at his home on charges of sexual battery and felony theft. It was not the dramatic arrest of a serial killer. It was an arrest for stealing 𝒔𝒆𝒙 toys.
But it was enough. It gave them the warrants they needed to search his property. What they found changed everything.
In Robinson’s home, they found blank sheets of paper signed by Lisa Stasi 15 years after her disappearance. They found receipts from the Rodeway Inn where Lisa had stayed. They found social security cards, new driver’s licenses, and signed slave contracts belonging to Suzette Trouten and Isabella Lewicka.
The next day, June 3, investigators went to Robinson’s 16-acre property in La Cygne, Kansas. That is where they found the two yellow barrels containing the bodies of Suzette Trouten and Isabella Lewicka. Trouten was blindfolded.
Both had been bludgeoned. Two days later, on June 5, they searched the storage facility in Raymore, Missouri, where Robinson rented space under Beverly Bonner’s name. Inside, they found three more barrels: Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, and Debbie Faith.
A mother and daughter together in death as they had been in life, sealed in separate drums in a rented storage unit that their killer had registered using one of their names. Five women, five barrels, all killed the same way. Two blows to the head from a blunt instrument consistent with a hammer.
Then came the discovery that no one was prepared for. When prosecutors began building their case, they traced Robinson’s crimes back to the 1980s. They already knew about Lisa Stasi’s disappearance in 1985.
They knew Robinson had been the last person to see her alive, but they did not know what had happened to her baby. DNA testing was conducted, fingerprints were compared, and the results confirmed what investigators had feared. Heather Tiffany Robinson, the girl being raised by John Robinson’s brother Donald and his wife Helen in Illinois, was Tiffany Lynn Stasi, Lisa Stasi’s missing daughter.
The baby who had disappeared along with her mother 15 years earlier was alive and living with the family of the man who had murdered her mother. Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison had to deliver the news. He told Donald and Helen Robinson the truth about how they had gotten their daughter.
He told them that the adoption paperwork was forged, that the attorney and the judge whose names appeared on the documents did not exist, that John Robinson had murdered a young woman and sold them her baby for $5,500. Donald Robinson said it was the only time he truly broke down. He was devastated by his brother’s betrayal and terrified by the possibility that he might lose the daughter he had raised for 15 years.
Morrison also met with Carl Stasi, Lisa’s ex-husband and Tiffany’s biological father. Carl had been searching for his daughter and his ex-wife since 1985. When he learned his daughter was alive, all he wanted was to meet her.
Heather Robinson was 15 years old when she learned the truth. The man she had known her entire life as Uncle John was a serial killer. He had murdered her biological mother.
He had stolen her from her mother’s arms as a baby and sold her to his own brother. Every family dinner, every holiday, every visit where Uncle John sat across the table from her, he had known exactly what he had done. Heather later said that Robinson had always given her a weird, off-putting feeling.
She described it as walking down a dark alley in the middle of the night while knowing someone is behind you, getting closer and closer. Her instinct had been right all along. She just had not known why.
With the bodies recovered and the DNA evidence connecting Robinson to Lisa Stasi’s baby, the case moved to trial. In 2002, John Edward Robinson stood trial in Johnson County, Kansas, for the murders of Suzette Trouten, Isabella Lewicka, and Lisa Stasi, along with charges of aggravated kidnapping and theft. District Attorney Paul Morrison led the prosecution.
The case file contained more than 23,000 pages of police reports. More than 100 witnesses were called to testify. It became the longest criminal trial in the history of the state of Kansas.
The prosecution’s case was built on physical evidence, financial records, and witness testimony. Investigators had recovered approximately 18 hammers from Robinson’s property. Forensic technicians examined them all but were unable to determine definitively which hammers were the murder weapons.
What they could determine was that every victim whose body was recovered had been killed the same way, with blows to the head from a small, rounded, blunt object consistent with a hammer.
The financial evidence was devastating. Robinson had collected Beverly Bonner’s alimony checks for years. He had collected the Faith family’s Social Security and disability payments for six years, totaling approximately $97,000.
He had forged letters in the names of dead women. He had used Bonner’s identity to register the storage unit where her own body was kept. The prosecution argued that Robinson had killed these women not out of rage or passion, but for money.
He murdered them and then he monetized their deaths. A defining moment in the trial came when Robinson’s wife, Nancy, took the stand. She had been married to Robinson for nearly four decades.
She had been in the house when he brought baby Tiffany home in January of 1985. She testified that Robinson came home during a terrible snowstorm with an infant he said was available for adoption by his brother. She said the baby was dirty and that Robinson did not have adequate supplies to care for her.
She bought clothing and infant supplies shortly afterward. Robinson called his brother and Donald and Helen flew to Kansas City the next day to pick up the baby. On cross-examination, prosecutor Morrison asked Nancy if she had any reason, any reason at all, to leave her husband now.
The question angered her. She said she did not know. Morrison could see that he had hit a nerve and he immediately backed off.
The defense argued that the murders were not connected by a common scheme and that there were unanswered questions and that not all of the killings were premeditated. But the pattern was overwhelming. The same method of killing, the same disposal in barrels, the same forged letters to families, the same theft of the victims’ financial benefits, the same lies.
On October 29, 2002, the jury returned its verdict in less than a single day: guilty on all counts. The sentencing phase followed. The state called no additional witnesses.
The defense called Nancy Robinson back to the stand. She attempted to humanize her husband. She told the jury about their grandchildren.
She mentioned that one grandchild had visited Robinson in jail, given him a hug, and said, Papa, orange is not your color. It was meant to soften the jury’s hearts. It did not work.
Jurors later said that if Robinson’s own children had spoken on his behalf, they might have been persuaded to spare his life. But his children did not testify. The jury deliberated for two days and returned a unanimous verdict.
John Edward Robinson was sentenced to death. He received two death sentences for the murders of Suzette Trouten and Isabelle Lewicka, and life imprisonment for the murder of Lisa Stasi, because Stasi was killed before Kansas reinstated the death penalty.
After the Kansas trial, Robinson faced five additional murder charges in Missouri for the deaths of Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, Debbie Faith, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine Clampitt. Missouri prosecutors pushed hard for a capital trial. Robinson’s attorneys knew that a Missouri jury would almost certainly sentence him to death again.
A plea deal was offered. The prosecutor, Chris Koster, insisted that as a condition of the deal, Robinson lead authorities to the bodies of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine Clampitt, the three victims who had never been found. Robinson refused.
He has never cooperated with investigators. He has never revealed what he did with those three women. It is the last piece of control he has, and he will not let it go.
Despite Robinson’s refusal, the deal was made. In October of 2003, Robinson acknowledged in a carefully scripted plea that the prosecution had enough evidence to convict him of capital murder for all five deaths. He pleaded guilty.
He received five life sentences without the possibility of parole. Observers noted that his plea was devoid of any remorse or specific acceptance of responsibility. He stared straight ahead during the victim impact statements, appearing bored.
The Robinson family released a statement after the Kansas trial. It said they had followed the events in horror and dismay and could not explain the two different men the world knew as John Robinson. Nancy Robinson filed for divorce in 2005 after 41 years of marriage, citing incompatibility and irreconcilable differences.
Heather Robinson, the stolen baby who had grown up as John Robinson’s niece, filed a civil lawsuit in 2006 against Truman Medical Center and social worker Karen Gaddis. The suit accused Gaddis of putting Robinson in contact with Lisa Stasi and her newborn daughter after Robinson told her he ran a charitable organization assisting unwed mothers. The suit argued that if Gaddis had done even basic due diligence, she would have discovered that Robinson was a convicted felon on probation for fraud and Lisa Stasi might still be alive.
Heather has spent the years since the trial trying to find her biological mother’s body so she can lay Lisa to rest. She has never been able to. Robinson will not tell anyone where Lisa is buried.
Robinson’s legal battles continued from death row. He filed multiple appeals. In November of 2015, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a massive 415-page opinion reviewing Robinson’s case.
The court threw out the Trouten capital murder conviction and the Stasi first-degree murder conviction on a technicality, finding that prosecutors had improperly relied on the same four victims to support multiple capital charges, creating a double jeopardy issue. However, the court upheld the Lewicka conviction and its accompanying death sentence. That ruling was historic.
It marked the first time the Kansas Supreme Court had upheld a death sentence since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1994. Robinson continued to fight. In 2016, he filed a civil lawsuit seeking a new trial.
In 2022, he returned to court arguing that he had not received effective legal counsel during his original trial. He hoped to have his death sentence vacated. He failed.
The courts denied his claims.
As of today, John Edward Robinson is 82 years old. He remains on death row at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Butler County, Kansas. His custody level is listed as special management.
He has received multiple disciplinary citations during his time in prison, including a recent reprimand for theft. Even on death row, decades after his conviction, Robinson is still stealing. It is the only thing he has ever been good at.
Kansas has not executed anyone since 1965. The state has the death penalty on its books, but it has not carried out an execution in more than 60 years. Robinson sits in a cell knowing that the sentence hanging over his head may never be carried out.
Nine men sit on death row in Kansas. Less than two-thirds of all Kansas death verdicts are even eligible to ever be carried out, given the rate at which sentences are overturned on appeal. The question that hangs over this entire case is whether a death sentence that is never carried out is justice or just a piece of paper.
Three of Robinson’s victims have never been found. Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, Katherine Clampitt. Their families have never been able to bury them.
Robinson knows where they are. He will never tell. Investigators have said publicly that Robinson may be responsible for more murders than the eight he has been convicted of.
Long stretches of his time remain unaccounted for. In 2006, the body of a young woman was found in an area of Iowa where Robinson once had a business partner. Police have never been able to conclusively link the body to Robinson, but the investigation remains open.
One investigator put it simply: he has maintained the secrets about what he has done with the women. He will never tell. It is the last control he has got.
There are probably other barrels waiting to be opened, other bodies waiting to be found.
John Edward Robinson was a boy scout who performed before the Queen of England. He was a man of the year who forged his own award. He was a Sunday school teacher who kept women in barrels.
He was a grandfather who coached baseball and spent his evenings in chat rooms looking for his next victim. He was the first serial killer to use the internet to hunt, and he did it before most people even knew what a chat room was. He murdered at least eight women.
He stole a baby from a dead mother’s arms and sold her to his own brother. He collected the social security checks of the women he killed for years after they were dead. When investigators finally opened those barrels and found what was inside, Robinson showed no emotion, no remorse, no explanation, just boredom.
Heather Robinson, the baby who survived, is now in her 40s. She is building a podcast called the Lisa Stasi Effect to tell her mother’s story in her own words. Lisa has said that Robinson always gave her a feeling she could not explain, a pit in her stomach, a sense that something was deeply wrong.
She was right. She just did not know that the source of that feeling was the man sitting across from her at the dinner table, smiling, passing the salt, keeping his secrets. Somewhere, in a place only John Edward Robinson knows, Lisa Stasi is still waiting to be found.