True Crime Documentary - Internet Slave Master - Serial Killer John Edward Robinson

True Crime Documentary - Internet Slave Master - Serial Killer John Edward Robinson

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
He referred to himself in emails on the BDSM website
as master, and that's what we knew him, asked the
slave master.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Anybody who really is a master, it's very very rare
for them to refer to themselves as a master.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
In our world.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's a huge red flag.

Speaker 4 (00:24):
Because you knew somebody was getting hurt, But the question
was what was consensual.

Speaker 5 (00:31):
And when did it cross the line.

Speaker 6 (00:34):
It's one of those ah moments where everybody's jaw kind
of drops, then you know, the hair stands up on
the back of your neck.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
And there was no crime scene, There was no body,
and there was just no hard evidence to indicate that
anything had happened to them.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
He knew what the rules of the game were. He
was able to turn those rules to his own benefit.

Speaker 5 (01:00):
FBI Criminal Pursuit.

Speaker 7 (01:06):
It's the winter of nineteen eighty five in Overland Park, Kansas,
a quiet bedroom community nestled just south of Kansas City.
Little do residents know their peaceful enclave is about to
become ground zero in a series of investigations that will
span years, unearthing some of the most diabolical and sordid

(01:28):
crimes Area law enforcement has ever seen. On January eleventh,
a frantic young woman contacts the Overland Park Police Department.
She's concerned about her sister in law, Lisa Stacey, who

(01:48):
she hasn't heard from in days.

Speaker 8 (01:52):
Lisa Stacey was a troubled young woman nineteen and she
was involved with a man named Carl. She got pregnant,
they got married, and they had this baby, Tiffany Lynn Stacy.
But the marriage quickly quickly fell apart. Within a few months, the.

Speaker 7 (02:15):
Couple splits and Carl moves to the Chicago area, where
he re enlists in the Navy. With no job and
no place to go, Lisa and four month old Tiffany
soon find themselves living in a group home for women.
But just a few days before her disappearance, Lisa's luck

(02:38):
takes a turn when she's accepted into a coveted Kansas
City Outreach program.

Speaker 8 (02:44):
The Kansas Outreach Program was a program that a businessman
named John Osborne had started to help young women with
young babies get a restart in life.

Speaker 7 (03:00):
It's an opportunity it's too good to refuse, and on
January ninth, Osborne picks Lisa and Tiffany up at her
in law's house.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
He had put them up at a hotel in Overland Park, Kansas,
near his office.

Speaker 9 (03:19):
But later that.

Speaker 7 (03:20):
Same night, Lisa makes a panicked phone call to her
mother in law.

Speaker 8 (03:26):
She's hysterical, she is crying and saying, they're saying, you're
going to take my baby away from me. You're saying
I'm a bad mother.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
And the mother in law said, we're you know, we're
not trying to take your baby away. And Lisa said,
it made me sign four black sheets of paper.

Speaker 8 (03:45):
And the mother in law says, don't do anything, don't
sign anything.

Speaker 10 (03:50):
I'm not involved in this in any way.

Speaker 8 (03:52):
And then Lisa says, they're coming now, and she hangs
up and that's the last time anybody here from Lisa.

Speaker 7 (04:04):
The following morning, her in laws called the motel in
search of Lisa and the baby, but there's stunned to
learn that Lisa's gone checked out her bill paid with
a credit card from a local business.

Speaker 8 (04:20):
They discover that it was not John Osborne that had
rented the room, but a John Robinson, and they got
an address for the business that he runs.

Speaker 7 (04:30):
Equitu Confused and worried, Lisa's brother in law checks out
the firm.

Speaker 8 (04:38):
A young man in his twenties tall is there and
basically rudely pushes him.

Speaker 10 (04:45):
Out the door.

Speaker 7 (04:47):
Then the mystery intensifies with yet another strange phone call.

Speaker 8 (04:54):
Stacy's family receives a call from a priest of Father
Martin at a mission in downtown Kansas City. This Father
Martin says that he's seen Lisa and Tiffany, that they're fine,
but that they've taken off and left town with a
guy named Bill. So the family, to verify this story,

(05:17):
calls the mission and they're told that there is no
Father Martin at the mission.

Speaker 10 (05:24):
And at that.

Speaker 8 (05:24):
Point the family is even more concerned and they go
to the police.

Speaker 7 (05:34):
Unfortunately, investigators have little to go on except for one thing.

Speaker 9 (05:39):
The case feels eerily familiar.

Speaker 7 (05:45):
Four months earlier, another nineteen year old named Paula Godfrey
who was living in the Overland Park area when she
too mysteriously disappeared.

Speaker 4 (05:56):
She answered an advertisement for a secretary position and it
involved some travel, some training, and things like that.

Speaker 8 (06:05):
Her parents never heard from her again. They did get
a letter saying that she needed some time on her
own away from her family, and you know, she was
off finding herself.

Speaker 10 (06:22):
They didn't believe it was really from her.

Speaker 8 (06:26):
Paula's mother convinced her husband to go and report it
to the police.

Speaker 7 (06:31):
But Paula is of legal age, and with no evidence
of a crime, there's a little police can do.

Speaker 4 (06:39):
It's not against a lot of being a missing person,
and the letters are saying, yeah, I'm fine, leave me alone.

Speaker 7 (06:47):
Yet now a young mother and her baby have also
gone missing, and that has authorities growing increasingly concerned.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
I had a couple of small kids, and I understood
what it would be like to lose a small child,
and I think that made it even more personal to me.

Speaker 7 (07:15):
The search for Lisa and her baby goes by the book.
Police start with the immediate family and work their way outward.
They questioned Lisa's estranged husband, Karl, with whom she had
a turbulent relationship.

Speaker 10 (07:31):
He had a solid alibi with it. He was back
in Chicago. I mean, he wasn't even in the picture
at the time that he gives it.

Speaker 7 (07:39):
Investigators also interviewed John Robinson, from the man in charge
of the outreach program Lisa hoped would be her salvation.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
And he told me, yeah, she was referred to me
with a young baby. You know, I had said I
would put her up in my Kansas City outreach program.
Lisa came to his office with a young man by
the name of Bill, who she said was her new boyfriend,
and that, you know, they were going to go off

(08:10):
together and they were going to start a new life.
And she really thanked Robinson for all of his help
and for being there to support her. But she really
thought it was coming together and she was just going
to go start a new life.

Speaker 5 (08:27):
Bill.

Speaker 7 (08:28):
Investigators have heard the name before. The mysterious father Martin
had also spoken of a Bill claiming that he and
Lisa had run off together. Now police wonder what they have,
a case of impetuous young love or perhaps something more lethal.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
It was just part of the confusion that was this
case as to how does this all tie together.

Speaker 7 (08:55):
According to reports, she'd recently joined a Kansas City out
each program for young mothers, but hit a roadblock when
she met a new boyfriend, a man police know only
his Bill, and from there the trail goes cold.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
There was no evidence of a crime, there was no
crime scene, there was no body there was I mean,
there was just no hard evidence to prove that anything
had happened to them.

Speaker 5 (09:34):
Then suddenly, a new twist in the case.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
These letters began to service. Lisa's mother in law got one,
the battered women's shelter got one, And in this letter,
Lisa had told the mother in law, I've been down
and out, you know, things haven't been going good. But
I've got an opportunity here to start a new life
and I'm going to do that. So thank you for

(10:03):
all that you've done. But I'm going to go off
and start a new life, and I'm just fine.

Speaker 7 (10:10):
There's no mention of Bill, but the rest of the
letter seems sincere except for one thing.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
This letter was typed. Lisa didn't know how to type,
and it just didn't sound like Lisa at all.

Speaker 7 (10:32):
But with little else to go on, the case of
Lisa and Tiffany, Stacy slowly ghost cold. Two years later,
in June nineteen eighty seven, another Kansas City resident reaches
out to Overland Park Police. He's searching for his stepsister,

(10:58):
twenty seven year old Catherine Clampet, a recent transplant to
the area, who he hasn't heard from in weeks.

Speaker 4 (11:07):
She was going to move up here to try to
improve her life.

Speaker 8 (11:14):
She answers an ad in the newspaper for an executive
secretary working for a busy CEO, and she goes to
work for a man named John Dawson.

Speaker 7 (11:29):
But not long after starting the new job, Catherine goes
a wall, or so it seems.

Speaker 8 (11:38):
A short time later, her mother, back in which taf Falls, Texas,
gets a letter, a typewritten letter that's signed by her daughter,
but it doesn't sound that much like her daughter, and
she grows concerned.

Speaker 7 (11:55):
Catherine's stepbrother calls her office and asks to speak to
her boss, John Dawson, but it's told that no such
employee exists.

Speaker 10 (12:08):
Her stepbrother went thro her belongings.

Speaker 8 (12:11):
He found a receipt for the hotel where she had stayed,
and it was signed by a John Robinson, not John Dawson.

Speaker 7 (12:23):
In fact, it's the very same John Robinson who recruited
Lisa Stacey into the Women's Outreach program two years earlier.
A quick check reveals that Robinson is the owner of
the company where Catherine works, a consulting firm called Equa two.

Speaker 8 (12:41):
So Catherine clampitt stepbrother pays a visit to the Equito offices,
only to find out that they're closed and that John
Robinson is actually starting to serve a prison sentence.

Speaker 7 (12:54):
As it turns out, Robinson had been arrested just weeks
earlier on charges of fraud theft.

Speaker 11 (13:01):
That he was just a small time con man. There
was no indication that he had been involved in anything
really much more than that.

Speaker 7 (13:10):
Investigators waste no time questioning anyone who may have information
on Katherine, but leads are few and far between.

Speaker 4 (13:19):
When the detectives started talking to potential witnesses, you know,
there was always a yeah, I saw her a couple
of weeks ago, or you know, I know that she
didn't go to work for Robinson.

Speaker 7 (13:28):
After all, witnesses memories are spotty and contradictory. But there's
an even bigger problem.

Speaker 4 (13:38):
The connection wasn't made immediately between Paul Godfrey, Lisa Stacy
and Catherine Clampad. The cases were being distributed to different detectives.
Now you can type in the names and a query
can be popped up and searched in fifteen seconds. Back then,
everything was done by hand.

Speaker 7 (13:59):
And police have little reason to cross reference old files
when there's no concrete evidence that a crime has been
committed in the first place.

Speaker 8 (14:08):
There were three disappearances connected to Robinson, but all three
involved troubled women who were going off elsewhere who had
sent letters home and wanted to be left alone. The
police were just treating these as typical missing persons reports,
where these women probably just did.

Speaker 10 (14:27):
Not want to be found.

Speaker 7 (14:33):
More than ten years pass and one by one the
cases go cold. Then, in March of two thousand, a
Michigan woman named Carolyn Troughton grows concerned about the welfare
of her twenty seven year old daughter, Susette.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
Suzette Troughton had told her family that she was moving
to Kansas because she was going to go to work
for a healthy businessman that did a lot of international traveling,
and she was going to take care of this businessman's
ailing father while they traveled.

Speaker 7 (15:14):
But within just a month of her arrival, Susette appears
to have vanished without a trace. Taking matters into her
own hands, Carolyn Troughton calls her daughter's employer, demanding to
know Susette's whereabouts.

Speaker 8 (15:30):
He tells her that Susette has decided to take off
with a man named Jim Turner, and they were going
to be sailing around the world, and she was not
going to be working for him.

Speaker 10 (15:41):
After all.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
Susette Troughton was a Mama's girl was always in contact
with her mom, either through email or on the telephone.
Carolyn knew that her daughter would call her and let
her fill her in on what was going on. She
knew something terrible had happened to her.

Speaker 5 (16:02):
Police are worried too.

Speaker 7 (16:04):
They've heard this story before several times, and when Carolyn
Troughton reveals the employer's name, it is one they know
all too well, John Robinson.

Speaker 4 (16:17):
Ironically, the sergeant and the watch commander that reviewed the
missing persons report that night both had dealings or were
aware of John Robinson from the nineteen eighties.

Speaker 7 (16:30):
This time, local police are determined not to let him
slip through their fingers, and it isn't long before agents
from the FBI's Kansas City Field office joined the investigation.

Speaker 3 (16:43):
We spent a lot of our time scratching our heads
and just trying to figure out what it is that
he was up to.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
At the time, he supposedly was running a business. It
was basically a magazine for mobile home trailer parks.

Speaker 7 (17:03):
Robinson's also married with four children and has worked hard
to gain respect within the local community, but police files
tell a different story.

Speaker 4 (17:17):
We knew he was a con man we knew he
was a thief.

Speaker 11 (17:20):
John had a number of convictions over the years, mainly
for small time con artists types of activities, embezzlements, those
sort of things.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
He never worked a legitimate job that he did not
cheat the company out of some kind of money.

Speaker 7 (17:43):
Still, investigators find themselves facing a number of troubling questions.
First and foremost, what would a two bit con man
be doing mixed up in the cases of four missing women?
And how do you go about mounting an investigation with
no evidence of an actual crime being committed?

Speaker 12 (18:03):
That we really needed to find all these individuals, make sure,
number one, they were alive, and find out what kind
of contact he was having with them, what was he
trying to do.

Speaker 7 (18:17):
Authority so particularly concerned about Tiffany Stacey, who disappeared at
just four months old, And we.

Speaker 12 (18:25):
Were all getting together on this, trying to get a
handle on it, and we didn't know what.

Speaker 5 (18:31):
Was going to be at the end of this road.
We had no idea.

Speaker 7 (18:36):
Soon, investigators get a new lead when letters and emails
begin arriving at the home of Carolyn Troughton, all signed
by her missing daughter Susette.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Then they started receiving letters from California, and then there
were a letter from Veracruz, Mexico that kind of threw
us for a loop.

Speaker 5 (18:57):
The mother never believed them.

Speaker 6 (18:59):
She said, you know, I read these letters, and I
can tell by the way they're written, by the fact
that there's no.

Speaker 5 (19:06):
Spelling errors, by the wording that she uses, the phrases
that she used. She said, I can tell.

Speaker 6 (19:13):
That my daughter is not writing these letters. But the
perplexing thing to her in all this way, she said,
the signature is my daughters.

Speaker 7 (19:25):
The pattern is a familiar one. But police hold off
on confronting Robinson. They don't want to tip their hand
just yet. Instead, they begin interviewing Susette's family and friends,
looking for anything that might bolster their case. What they
discover next turns.

Speaker 9 (19:44):
The entire investigation on its head.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Well, Susante Trout was kind of a free spirit. She
was in the BDSM lifestyle. She was always on the
internet with people in that lifestyle, and she was ready
to be on her own.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
BDSM stands for a bondishing discipline dominantnes submission say it
as a masterism. A great deal of what this comes
down to is somebody is enjoying the fantasy of having power,
and somebody is enjoying the fantasy of being powerless.

Speaker 7 (20:25):
Though legal BDSM is a practice often conducted in secret, none.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
Of us really knew anything about it. So while we're
trying to work the case, we're trying.

Speaker 5 (20:36):
To learn about this lifestyle.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
Pain is part of this lifestyle, so slapping or spanking
someone that's natural.

Speaker 7 (20:48):
According to her friends, Susette was a sexual submissive or
slave who often served the Internet looking for a master.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
A master is usually a person who owns a slave.
The slave has acknowledged that person as their master, and
they are held with a certain level of respect in
the community.

Speaker 7 (21:15):
Investigators learned that Suzette had recently found a new master,
but this time she was in way over her head.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
Anybody who really is a master, it's very very rare
for them to refer to themselves as a master.

Speaker 7 (21:31):
According to Suzette's friends, she was a member of the
Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission Sadanism and Masochism Community,
or BDSM.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
More people have joined the community since the nineties since
the stigma has started to fall away.

Speaker 7 (21:49):
Police also learned that, prior to her disappearance, Suzette corresponded
with a BDSM master online and relocated to Kansas City
to work as a nurse's aid for his elder father.

Speaker 6 (22:02):
She would come to this area at the behest of
this guy named John Robinson.

Speaker 7 (22:10):
But while Robinson has a checkered background, to say the
least on the surface, there's nothing to suggest the suburban
father of four would have been involved in something like
b DSM, let alone anything dangerous.

Speaker 5 (22:24):
Name of the social work.

Speaker 13 (22:26):
I never ever had the feeling that this John Robinson
was a killer.

Speaker 11 (22:31):
Our oppression of John Robinson was that he was a
small time con artist who had been involved in a
number of con schemes over the years, but nothing really
more than that.

Speaker 7 (22:42):
Still, with connections to a string of mysterious disappearances.

Speaker 9 (22:46):
There's no denying Robinson is more than he appears to be.

Speaker 12 (22:52):
Mister Robinson had his hand in a lot of different areas.
He was in various businesses. He'd make contact with hospitals
about unwed mothers. He'd also made contact with charities about
unwed mothers, helping them out.

Speaker 5 (23:14):
So it's very bizarre.

Speaker 13 (23:16):
He was after these women for some strange sexual reason.
I'm not sure what it was.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
We knew that he was involved with at least three
women that had been reported as missing to us in
the nineteen eighties, so we had a pretty good history
on him. We had a pretty good feeling that the
guy was up to no good.

Speaker 7 (23:40):
Paula Godfrey, Lisa and Tiffany Stacy, Catherine Clampett, and now
Susante Troughton. The question is could any of these missing
women still be alive? Could they be serving as sex
slaves or something police haven't even considered.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
This was the type of case that you know, you
went home at night and that's all you thought about,
is what am I missing? What could I have done?
What should I be doing? You're thinking of that as
you drive to work. But if you're going through the file,
you're going there's got to be something here I'm missing.

Speaker 7 (24:20):
Determined to prove once and for all that this small
time crook is up to something more sinister, Local police
and FBI begin to dig deeper.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
And called in all the retired detectives that had, you know,
worked his cases, the FBI agents, the BASERI approbation officer.
We were looking into his criminal background, trying to find
any clues that we could use against him.

Speaker 11 (24:48):
I believe the baby was probably still alive someplace.

Speaker 7 (24:53):
Tiffany Stacey, missing since nineteen eighty five, would be fifteen
years old by now.

Speaker 11 (24:59):
We actually thought that he may have been involved in
some sort of a baby selling rink, and there.

Speaker 12 (25:04):
Was also an activity of prostitution involved in this background
as well.

Speaker 5 (25:12):
Oh, we had a couple of performants.

Speaker 11 (25:14):
One was a guy who was in the topless Bars.
He was bird dogging women for John Robinson. I had
another informant who actually posed for some pictures and did
some stuff with John. John tried to recruit her, telling
her that she could make two to three thousand dollars
in a weekend if she would fly around the country

(25:35):
doing these these bid these jobs for them.

Speaker 5 (25:42):
We thought perhaps.

Speaker 4 (25:44):
That he might have been taking the women and selling
them in the prostitution, maybe across state lines, maybe even
international lines.

Speaker 11 (25:54):
It was hard to figure out exactly what he was doing.
You know, it seemed like he was a con man
on one hand, but on the other hand, he seemed
to be involved in these other things which were darker.

Speaker 7 (26:09):
With a mounting list of circumstantial evidence but still no
proof of an actual crime, investigators set up surveillance so
they can track every move their suspect.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
Makes We didn't want to tip our hand at any
time to let Robinson know we've contacted him. The gig
was up and he would start, you know, denying everything
and possibly sending us on goose chases.

Speaker 7 (26:35):
Within a matter of weeks, investigators learned that Robinson is
in fact living a dual life.

Speaker 8 (26:44):
Well, at home, he's a family man, he's got four children, married,
and very suburban.

Speaker 10 (26:53):
Middle class lifestyle.

Speaker 8 (26:55):
During the day, he's frequenting inner city, Kansas City, hanging
out with these sort of sketchy underworld characters and you know,
prostitute strippers and lots and lots of different kinds of women.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
We followed him to homes in the Johnson County area,
and we followed him to motels where he had women
meet him there. The man was just in total action
until five o'clock when his wife got.

Speaker 5 (27:24):
Off four.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
Robinson thought he was smarter and brighter than anyone else,
that if he got caught, he would just tell another lie,
as he had done for so many years, and he
didn't believe that there was anyone that was going to
hold him accountable.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
We did a wire tap. We would subpoena records for
Internet usage. We got some search warrants for his email accounts.
We had two women in Canada that were sharing emails
that he was sending to them and they were sending
it to us, so we were getting almost real time

(28:06):
his communications with them. That kind of gave us some
insight into what he was doing.

Speaker 7 (28:11):
As investigators suspect Robinson is frequenting the BDSM websites in
search of slaves.

Speaker 13 (28:19):
Well, to me, he seemed like just a very commonplace
a little man who you would never suspect being involved
in S and M type activities.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
He referred to himself in emails on the BDSM website
as master, and that's what we knew him as the
slave master.

Speaker 7 (28:45):
His pattern is, if anything consistent, Robinson agrees to play
master to eager submissives, enticing them further with the offer
of a job.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
He promised them the moon, and a lot of these
women and just took it. We're hooked and came to
Kansas City.

Speaker 7 (29:06):
Investigators are shocked to learn how many women would come
to town to be a complete stranger's slave.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
At the master slave level, the trust is considered to
be in violate, and that's a two way street. The
master has to have a complete trust of the slave,
just as much as the slave has trusted the master.

Speaker 7 (29:31):
The authorities soon set up stakeouts at motels where Robinson
entertains is out of town guests, and through the walls.

Speaker 9 (29:40):
A secret world comes alive.

Speaker 4 (29:43):
Or they could hear talking, a lady's voice, his voice,
They could hear what they thought was maybe some slaps,
and we knew that he was into this BDSM lifestyle
and that probably was taking place in that room. It
was a really tense time for law enforcement because you

(30:05):
knew somebody was getting hurt, but the question was what
was consensual and win did across the line?

Speaker 9 (30:15):
Police get an unexpected break in the case.

Speaker 7 (30:20):
One of Robinson's slaves, a woman named Brenda, comes forward
with a familiar tale.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
She came to Lenax to work for a man she
knew as James Turner. She was down on her luck.
She was unemployed at the time, had no money.

Speaker 7 (30:39):
But when she begins meeting with Turner at a local motel,
Brenda gets a whole lot more than she bargained for.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
One of the times they had an argument and she
was struck by him a little too hard. She went
up to the desk to inquire who had rented the room.
She was told James Robinson, and so she knew something
wasn't right.

Speaker 7 (31:06):
Brenda files a complaint with police, accusing Robinson alias James
Turner of sexual battery.

Speaker 6 (31:16):
We ended up documenting the about seventeen false identities that
he used with various people over the years.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
It just went on and on. The more you investigated,
the more the deeper and more complex.

Speaker 7 (31:28):
This case God alias is con games violent sex. Police
are now certain their con man is up to something
more criminal, and the time to act is now. Days later,

(31:49):
another woman comes forward and files a similar complaint sexual
battery plus robbery against John Robinson. With two accusations and
search warrants in hand, police finally have enough to make
an arrest.

Speaker 4 (32:08):
We felt like this was gonna be our probably last
best chance to catch this guy.

Speaker 7 (32:17):
On June second, authorities descend on Robinson's home and Oletha Kansas.

Speaker 5 (32:24):
We were all a nervous red.

Speaker 4 (32:26):
It was just very tense and kind of nervous time,
I think for everybody. He answered the door if we
knocked on, it was polite, was you know, kind of
care free, invite us in. We told him that he
was under arrest. We told him that we had actually
been investigating him for quite a while.

Speaker 7 (32:47):
The arrest warrant charges Robinson with sexual battery and robbery,
but investigators waste no time raising the subject of missing
persons Lisa and Tiffany Stacey, Paula Godfrey, Catherine Clampett, and
Susan At Troughton.

Speaker 4 (33:01):
Robinson kind of turned pale. He started like almost hyperventilating.
I remember he turned back and looked at me and
he goes Jesus Christ like that and just kind of
collapsed on the chair. I think it was a real
shock to him, and I think he knew we had him.
But when we walked him out of the house, you know,
he picked himself back up and he was kind of

(33:23):
back to his arrogant self, and he said, you know,
you guys are really making a big production out of this,
aren't you.

Speaker 7 (33:33):
Police confiscate Robinson's computer and files dating back years, leaving
nothing to chance. They also secure warrants for several storage
units he rents in Oletha, Kansas in Raymore, Missouri, along
with a family farm in Lynn County. It is that

(33:53):
these three locations that investigators' worst fears are confirmed.

Speaker 5 (34:00):
The oleath.

Speaker 6 (34:00):
The storage locker proved to be a treasure trove of evidence.
Burst certific gets driver's license, so security cards belonging to
several of these new women, the kinds of things that
you don't give them unless you're dead.

Speaker 5 (34:15):
It sort of confirmed what we'd been thinking all.

Speaker 6 (34:17):
Along, and that is we're thinking, where are these letters
coming from.

Speaker 7 (34:22):
It's an impressive hall, but a good defense attorney can
argue a simple fact.

Speaker 9 (34:27):
Where there's no body, there's no crime.

Speaker 7 (34:31):
The next day, a team hits the Lynn County farm
along with the Missouri Search and Rescue canine unit.

Speaker 4 (34:39):
Down the Lynn County property, we found a mobile home,
We found a storage shed, some other items out by it.
When we did the perimeter search where the shed was
and the barrels were, we found specifically two a large
eighty eight gallon has matt barrels where.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
We were actually going to need who move the barrels
out in order for the dog could get a good
scent there. And when I rolled the barrel out and
brought it upright then we saw blood coming out.

Speaker 4 (35:11):
We ended up finding Susanne's body. She was decomposing pretty
well by then. You know, you're kind of sad because
obviously she's gone, but you're you're elated because you finally
have got something on the sky.

Speaker 7 (35:31):
Investigators open the second barrel and are stunned by what
they find. A second body, but the corpse does not
bear any resemblance to the other missing women they've been
searching for.

Speaker 4 (35:44):
The second barrel that we opened took us into a
whole new realm of you know, who's this and what
have we gotten into now?

Speaker 1 (35:54):
Now instead of one murder investigation, we had two, and
we were starting all over with this one.

Speaker 9 (36:00):
Meanwhile, across the state line, in one.

Speaker 7 (36:03):
Of Robinson's other storage units, investigators have their own mystery
to contend, with three more barrels, three more bodies in
varying states of decomposition.

Speaker 11 (36:19):
It was just a sick feeling.

Speaker 5 (36:21):
I was just dumbfounded.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
I remember, I just walked through that night and that
whole weekend.

Speaker 7 (36:28):
I mean, I remember, just in Hayes, Investigators wonder if
the long search for Lisa Stacey, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine
Clampett has finally.

Speaker 9 (36:40):
Come to an end.

Speaker 7 (36:44):
On June twelfth, a pathologist identifies the body found in
the second barrel on Robinson's farm as Isabella Leaviska, a
twenty one year old Polish immigrant.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Isabella Leviska had never been reported missing and it came
as quite a shock to that family. They thought she
was traveling over in Europe. Of that because John Robinson
had covered his tracks in that case too, and they
had received letters and emails supposedly from Europe.

Speaker 7 (37:18):
According to an autopsy report, Isabella and Susette Troughton both
died from blunt force trauma to the head. The likely
weapon a small ballpeen hammer.

Speaker 6 (37:31):
Most of the women had no defensive injuries, which suggested
to us that they didn't know it was coming, meaning
they were sleep maybe look in the other direction.

Speaker 7 (37:41):
By the end of June comes another shock. Autops He's
completed on the remaining three bodies revealed they are not,
in fact Lisa Stacey, Paula Godfrey, or Catherine Clampett. On
the contrary, these remains belonged to three entirely new victims,
Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith and her disabled fifteen year old

(38:05):
daughter Debbie, all killed by blunt force trauma.

Speaker 4 (38:10):
When you think of the enormity and all the people
that he killed, it.

Speaker 5 (38:16):
Kind of boggles of mind.

Speaker 9 (38:18):
Even stranger.

Speaker 7 (38:20):
Police find no missing person reports filed for any of
the three new victims. An investigation soon reveals that Robinson
seduced Beverly Bonner, a prison librarian, while he was incarcerated
during the nineteen nineties.

Speaker 9 (38:36):
The affair continued even after his release.

Speaker 8 (38:42):
He pretty quickly discovers that she's getting one thousand dollars
a month alimony checks from her ex husband, and so
he kills her and then starts pocketing her alimony checks.

Speaker 7 (38:56):
Like Isabella Leaviscus family, the Bonners are shocked by the news.

Speaker 4 (39:01):
They knew that something wasn't quite right, but she also
was writing letters and cashing alimony checks, so they never
quite could figure out if she was missing or not.

Speaker 7 (39:15):
Sheila and Debbie Faith meet a similar fate after Sheila
encounters Robinson in an online chat room.

Speaker 8 (39:24):
I don't think that John Robinson had any interest in
Sheila romantically.

Speaker 10 (39:29):
He just had an interest in.

Speaker 8 (39:30):
Their disability checks, and he started cashing their checks and cash.

Speaker 10 (39:36):
Them for six years.

Speaker 7 (39:38):
It now seems almost certain to investigators that Lisa, Tiffany, Paula,
and Catherine are also dead, and while Robinson's motive for
killing these women remains unclear.

Speaker 9 (39:52):
His ability to manipulate them was undeniable.

Speaker 8 (39:57):
Robinson had a uncanny ability to get inside the heads
of the women that he was praying.

Speaker 9 (40:07):
On, and getting them to write or sign batches of letters.

Speaker 5 (40:11):
Was the key to his deception.

Speaker 6 (40:15):
He was able to convince these women to write these letters,
to sign their names on blind pieces of paper, because
what he would tell them is, we're going to.

Speaker 5 (40:23):
Be traveling in China or Paris. You're not gonna have
time to write letters.

Speaker 6 (40:28):
So what I want you to do is fill out
some letters now.

Speaker 7 (40:33):
But Robinson's audacity astounds even the FBI when they come
across as strange and disturbing new tip.

Speaker 5 (40:41):
It floored me.

Speaker 4 (40:42):
I mean, I think it just absolutely shocked everybody.

Speaker 9 (40:46):
Chasing down a tip.

Speaker 7 (40:47):
Authorities soon learned that Robinson helped his brother adopt a
baby for five thousand dollars back in nineteen eighty five.

Speaker 5 (40:55):
One of the.

Speaker 12 (40:58):
Really shocking moments was when Missus Robinson handed me a photograph.
I looked at my partner and we were kind of stunned.
We knew that, well, that's definitely Tiffany.

Speaker 7 (41:18):
The photograph was given to them by Robinson the day
he delivered the baby to her new home, just as
Lisa and Tiffany Stacy were reported missing.

Speaker 4 (41:28):
We believe that that John Robinson met and ended up
taking Lisa Stacy, specifically for Lisa's baby, Tiffany, and I
imagine that he killed her. I mean, you look at
Social Security, you look at credit cards, bank accounts. She's
never been heard or seeing from the bureau.

Speaker 7 (41:51):
Soon makes a preliminary ID using Tiffany Stacy's footprint from
the day she was born.

Speaker 9 (41:56):
It's a perfect match.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
Possibly, can you be that cruel not only to kill
the mother, adopt the kid out to your own brother,
and actually charged him several thousand dollars for it.

Speaker 4 (42:11):
They thought everything was on the up and up. They
had the papers, they had the adoption forms that looked
like been signed by judges and attorneys. They had no clue.

Speaker 9 (42:21):
The teenage girl once called Tiffany, is shocked.

Speaker 7 (42:24):
To learn the truth, but ultimately she decides to stay
with the Robinsons.

Speaker 12 (42:30):
And they considered her their daughter. They had raised her
and they wanted to keep her, and they were victims
of mister Robinson's just like all these other women were.

Speaker 7 (42:46):
On October seventh, two thousand and two, fifty eight year
old John Robinson stands trial in Johnson County, Kansas for
the murder of Lisa Stacey, Susette Troughton, and Isabella Laviska.

Speaker 5 (43:01):
He pleads not guilty.

Speaker 4 (43:04):
I think John Robinson was the kind of person that
thought that the world was his. I think he thought
whatever he needed or whatever he wanted, he would get,
it didn't matter.

Speaker 5 (43:15):
Who it belonged to.

Speaker 7 (43:20):
In January of two thousand and three, a jury sentences
Robinson to life imprisonment for the murder of Lisa Stacey
and two death penalties for the murders of Suzette Trout
and Isabella Laviska.

Speaker 5 (43:34):
I was elated.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
I could not think of a man that deserved to
suffer the ultimate punishment in John Robinson.

Speaker 4 (43:45):
As a cop, I mean, that's the highlight of my career.
But this is what you go into law enforcement for.
And I feel great about what the work we did.
It was a great case that we put together and
we took a very dangerous person out of society.

Speaker 7 (44:02):
To this day, no one can say for sure what
caused Robinson, a family man and two bit con.

Speaker 9 (44:08):
Artist, to become a serial killer.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
There's no clear picture as to say this is why
he turned out this way. You know, Robinson came from
a middle class, religious, suburban family. He has several siblings.
You know, they're not involved in criminal activity.

Speaker 6 (44:33):
He was somebody who didn't really have the ability to
empathize with anybody.

Speaker 5 (44:38):
He was sort of consciousness.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
The game was everything, The con was everything. Winning was everything.

Speaker 7 (44:45):
After his trials in Kansas, Robinson makes a deal with
prosecutors in Missouri, a state that also has the death penalty.
In exchange for a life sentence, he pleads guilty to
the murders of Paula Godfrey, Catherine Clampet, Beverly Bonnard, and.

Speaker 9 (45:05):
Sheila and Debbie Faith.

Speaker 7 (45:10):
To this day, the bodies of Lisa Stacy, Paula Godfrey,
and Catherine Clampet have not been recovered.

Speaker 8 (45:19):
And I think that there are more victims than the
ones he's admitted to.

Speaker 10 (45:25):
Some of the families didn't.

Speaker 8 (45:26):
Even realize that their loved ones were no longer alive.

Speaker 10 (45:31):
There's probably possibly other victims out there.

Speaker 4 (45:35):
He's got people that he's killed, he's got people that
he's hurt, He's got people that he's stolen from. I
mean to include family members, all just for his own game.
For his own pleasure, whatever I mean, it's just it's
to me, it's unfathomable.

Speaker 5 (45:56):
Play.

Speaker 6 (45:56):
What you got here is a con man who's also
serial killer.

Speaker 5 (46:00):
You know, I'm not sure which came first.