Murder.com (12 page)

After receiving no reply to their letters, the Lewickas grew extremely anxious about their daughter and in August drove to Kansas to find out what was the matter. They arrived to find that the address on Metcalf Avenue was simply a mailbox; their daughter didn’t live there. When they asked the manager of the place for Izabel’s forwarding address, he refused to divulge the
information. Despite their anxiety, Izabel’s parents did not bother to contact the police but returned to Indiana.

Izabel was, in fact, still alive at that time and living a life far removed from the one she had known in Indiana. And she had good reason to keep it a secret from her parents. Her new friend JR had provided her with an apartment in south Kansas City and there they enjoyed a BDSM relationship. They even had a ‘slave contract’ which contained more than 100 clauses governing their conduct, she as the slave and he as the master.

In return for her submission, JR maintained Izabel financially, paying all her bills. When she wasn’t engaged in sexual activity with him, Izabel enjoyed the life of a lady of leisure. Her main interest was reading gothic and vampire novels bought from a specialist bookshop in Overland Park that she visited frequently. But she didn’t abandon her studies completely, for in the autumn of 1998, using the surname Lewicka-Robinson, Izabel enrolled at Johnson County Community College. Her adoption of JR’s surname lends weight to reports which concluded that the young woman believed they were going to marry. In any event, in January 1999, a few months after her enrolment at the college, JR moved Izabel into another apartment, in Olathe. This was closer to his own home, which may account for his sometimes describing her as a graphic designer employed by his company Specialty Publications. On occasion, however, he is known to have referred to her as his adopted daughter, while at other times he described her as his niece.

Then Izabel Lewicka disappeared and was never heard from again.

Slavemaster soon returned to the world of sadomasochistic chatrooms and made contact with Suzette Trouten, a 27-year-old nurse from Newport, Michigan.

Suzette, whose non-sexual interests were collecting teapots and doting on her two Pekinese, pursued a highly active BDSM lifestyle, carrying on relationships with as many as four dominants at once.

She had pierced not only her nipples and navel but also five places in and around her genitals, all to accommodate rings and other devices used in BDSM rituals. A photograph of Suzette, with nails driven through her breasts, had been circulated on the internet. She certainly appealed to JR and soon a relationship developed.

In fact, JR was so enamoured of his new, submissive friend that he concocted a very attractive job offer to entice her to fly down from Michigan for an interview. He paid for her flight, and when she arrived at Kansas City there was a limousine at the airport to meet her.

The job, he told her, involved being a companion and nurse to his very rich, elderly father, who travelled a lot but needed constant care. He went on to say that his father did most of his travelling on a yacht and that her duties would involve her sailing with them between California and Hawaii. For this, she would be paid a salary of $60,000 and be provided with an apartment and a car. He neglected to mention that the only way to have contact with his father would be through the use of a Ouija board, or a medium, as the old man had been dead for some ten years. But JR was not a man to let such details inhibit his designs and he gave Suzette to understand that the interview had gone well and the job was hers. She returned to
Michigan and began putting her affairs in order before relocating to Kansas.

While she was making ready to move, Suzette spoke to her mother, Carolyn, to whom she was very close, telling her all about her new job. She also discussed it with Lori Remington, a Canadian friend; they had met in a chatroom and shared an interest in BDSM. Later, she introduced Lori to JR on the internet and they too developed a long-distance, dominant–submissive, cyber relationship.

In February 2000, Suzette rented a truck, loaded it with her belongings and headed off to her new life in Kansas City. She took with her clothes, books, her collection of teapots and the two Pekinese, along with her array of BDSM accessories, including whips and paddles.

Lenexa is a suburb of Kansas City, lying west of Overland Park and north of Olathe, and it was there that Robinson took Suzette, when she arrived on 14 February. He had reserved accommodation for her, Room 216, at the Guesthouse Suites, an extended-stay hotel, and arranged for her dogs, Peka and Harry, to be boarded at the kennels of Ridgeview Animal Hospital in Olathe. They would be able to go with her on the yacht, he explained, but the Guesthouse Suites didn’t allow dogs.

Almost immediately after Suzette had settled in, JR told her to get herself a passport, as they would be leaving in a fortnight. He also produced a ‘master–slave’ contract covering their BDSM activities, which she duly signed. Then, ominously, he got her to attach her signature to 30 sheets of blank paper and to address more than 40 envelopes to relatives and some of her friends. Just as he had done with other women, he told Suzette that he would
take care of her correspondence while they were travelling, as she would be too busy to do so herself.

Suzette was the youngest of a family of five children and, according to Carolyn Trouten, ‘She was a kind of a mama’s girl.’ While she was in Kansas, she phoned her mother every day, keeping her informed of how things were going and, although she had at first worried that she would be homesick, she seemed to be in good spirits and was certainly happy with her employer, John Robinson. And he was, evidently, happy with her.

On 1 March, Carolyn spoke to her daughter, who was looking forward to her impending yacht cruise with her wealthy boss and his father, and Suzette promised to phone her regularly.

Then Suzette simply disappeared. After not having spoken with her daughter for some time, Carolyn made a few discreet enquiries, then called the police.

Detective David Brown began an immediate and thorough investigation of the man whom he saw as the prime suspect, John Robinson. He obtained JR’s criminal record and contacted the Overland Park Police. The rap sheet acquainted him with the other reports of missing women and soon he saw the potential connection. After two detectives had spoken to Stephen Haymes, Robinson’s probation officer in Missouri, it became clear that they could possibly be investigating a serial killer.

David Brown instructed the Trouten family and a few other acquaintances of JR’s to tape their telephone conversations with JR and to pass to the police copies of all emails from him.

At the time that Suzette had been preparing to move to Kansas, JR, using the name James Turner, had established two more BDSM friendships on the internet. The first woman was a psychologist from Texas who had placed an advert on a BDSM
site. She had recently lost her job and when JR became aware of this he promised to help her to find work in the Kansas City area.

Jeanne arrived in Lenexa on 6 April and, while staying at the Guesthouse Suites, spent five days getting to know JR. During that time she signed a contract in which she consented to ‘give my body to him in any way he sees fit’. They also discussed her working for Hydro-Gro and JR told her to return home and prepare to move to Kansas City.

Jeanne returned for another long weekend in late April and it was then that she found that JR was eager to pursue more severe and violent forms of bondage sex than she wanted, but as she believed he was going to find work for her she consented to his demands, allowing him to brutalise her far beyond the limits she had intended. She later testified that he took photographs of her while she was bound and nude and hit her hard across the face. ‘I had never been slapped that hard by anybody before,’ she told the court. She also stressed that the photographs were taken against her wishes and despite her protests.

Fortunately for Jeanne, the promised move to Kansas never took place and she demanded the return of her sex toys, worth more than $500. JR chivalrously refused. Moreover, he threatened to publicly reveal the slave contract and the explicit, compromising photographs.

Jeanne’s response was to report the matter to the police.

Kate was the second of the two women, and she turned out to be the last one to fall foul of Slavemaster. She was an accountant and, after some weeks of preamble on the internet, agreed to become Robinson’s slave. In mid-May she journeyed to Kansas for a few days with JR and was installed in an apartment at the Guesthouse Suites.

Later, Kate recalled that on Friday, 19 May she received a phone call from Robinson telling her that he would be coming round to see her. During the call he instructed her that when he arrived she was to be kneeling in the corner of the room completely naked with her hair tied back.

Submissive Kate was ready, as instructed, when JR arrived. Yet she wasn’t prepared for what actually happened. He walked into the room, grabbed her by her hair and flogged her brutally across her breasts and back. Like Jeanne before her, Kate was discovering that JR was interested in a much rougher relationship than she wanted. She, too, didn’t like being photographed during sex, but he insisted on doing so; he seemed excited by recording the marks his beatings made on her body. However, Kate’s genuine distaste for that level of treatment must have spoiled his enjoyment, because he told her he didn’t like her attitude and wanted to end their relationship. Her body burning and bruised from the flogging, Kate became hysterical and after JR had left she got dressed and made her way in tears to the reception desk. There she asked for the registration card and it was then that she discovered that her host’s name was not James Turner but John Robinson. Worried and distraught, she called Lenexa Police, who, on hearing that JR was involved, gave her complaint the utmost priority.

The detective who arrived at the hotel in response to Kate’s call was David Brown, who had been investigating Robinson since the disappearance of Suzette Trouten more than two months before. Convinced that JR was a killer, Brown was not going to risk leaving another woman in the position of being a potential victim. When he had heard Kate’s tearful story, he got her to collect her belongings together and moved her to another hotel.

The next day, Kate gave a full interview to Detective David Brown. She explained how she had met ‘James Turner’ via the internet and how she had been invited to Kansas to embark on a master-and-slave relationship. She told him that Robinson had beaten her with a violence far beyond her desires, explaining that she didn’t go in for pain and punishment or marks on her skin. ‘I’m a submissive, not a masochist,’ she said.

The complaints and statements from the two women from Texas, Jeanne and Kate, gave the police the means to justify arresting the man who had been the subject of their investigation into the unexplained disappearances of several women. On Friday, 2 June, nine police cars drove to the Santa Barbara Estates in Olathe, where they surrounded 36 Monterey. There detectives arrested John E. Robinson and charged him with sexual assault – although by the end of the following few days he would willingly have settled for such a simple charge. Visibly shocked, JR was handcuffed and driven away to the Johnson County Jail. At the same time, police and detectives spilled from the eight other cars and began to execute a search warrant for the Robinson home.

Inside, as well as seizing all five of JR’s computers, the police found a blank sheet of notepaper which had been signed by Lisa Stasi more than 15 years earlier, in January 1985. Along with this were receipts from the Rodeway Inn in Overland Park which showed that JR had checked Lisa out on 10 January of that year, the day after she and her baby, Tiffany, had last been seen alive by the managers. However, those first scraps of evidence were only the tip of a gigantic iceberg: Far more would come to light over the next few days and it would horrify those who found it.

The police investigation had been thorough and revealed all
property owned or rented by Robinson. Consequently, a second search warrant had been obtained for that morning and, as JR was being driven to jail, detectives were busy searching his storage locker in Olathe. There they found a cornucopia of items connecting him to two of the missing women, Izabel Lewicka and Suzette Trouten. They found Trouten’s birth certificate, her Social Security card, several sheets of blank notepaper signed ‘Love ya, Suzette’ and a slave contract signed by her. Beside Suzette’s things, they found Izabel’s driving licence, several photographs of her, nude and in bondage, a slave contract and several BDSM sex implements. They also found a stun gun and a pillowcase.

On the following day, Saturday, 3 June, another search warrant was served. This time, the search team descended on the smallholding that the Robinsons owned near La Cygne. They found two 55-gallon metal barrels near a shed and opened one. Inside was the body of a naked woman, head down and immersed in the fluid which had been produced by decomposition of the body.

The detective who opened the barrel, Harold Hughes, a forensic crime-scene investigator, turned his attention to the second barrel and prised open the lid. Inside, he found a pillow and a pillowcase, which he removed, to reveal another body. Again, it was that of a woman, but this one was clothed. Like the first body, this one was immersed in the fluid resulting from its own decomposition. Hughes completed the customary procedures of photographing and fingerprinting the barrels before resealing them and marking them ‘Unknown 1’ and ‘Unknown 2’.

Later that day, Stephen Haymes, Robinson’s former probation
officer, was told of the discovery of the bodies. After so many years of suspicion, his judgement of JR was vindicated. He later told David McClintick, ‘It confirmed what I had always believed, but the move from theory to reality was chilling.’

At the time that Haymes was learning of Robinson’s arrest, the District Attorney for Johnson County, Paul Morrison, was contacting his counterpart in Cass County, across the state line in Missouri, in order to negotiate the issue of another search warrant. Detectives had discovered that JR maintained a locker at the Stor-Mor-For-Less depot in Raymore, a Missouri suburb of Kansas City. Morrison was an influential figure and was given total co-operation in cutting through the red tape inevitable in issues negotiated between two states. As a result of his discussion, he and a group of detectives from Johnson County arrived at the office of Cass County’s deputy prosecutor, Mark Tracy, early the next morning. They carried with them the longest affidavit, in support of a search warrant, that Tracy had ever seen. It asserted that Robinson was believed to have killed several women and that it was suspected that evidence connected with the killings was hidden in the storage locker in Raymore; he had paid to rent the locker with a company cheque, in order to conceal his identity.