Murder.com (13 page)

At 8am on the Monday morning, Tracy served the search warrant at the storage depot and the Johnson County detectives were led to Robinson’s locker. Inside was a lot of clutter and the task force spent more than half an hour sifting through it before they saw, hidden at the back, three barrels. Wafting from the barrels came the nauseating, unmistakable smell of decomposing flesh.

As it was virtually certain that the barrels contained dead
bodies, Tracy summoned his boss, Chris Koster, and the state of Missouri assumed immediate control of the crime scene. A new team of police investigators arrived and the locker was emptied of all its contents, save for the three barrels. These were found to be standing on piles of cat litter; obviously a futile attempt by JR to reduce the smell that was emanating from them.

The first barrel was opened, to reveal a light brown sheet, a pair of spectacles and a shoe. When the crime-lab technician had removed the sheet, he took hold of the shoe, only to find that there was a foot inside it and the foot was still attached to a leg. On the assumption that the storage depot wasn’t the best place to investigate the barrels and their contents, it was decided to reseal them and take them to the medical examiner’s office in Kansas City. This was not as simple as it seemed. There was a very real fear that the bottoms of the barrels might corrode and give way, so a police officer was sent to a nearby Wal-Mart to buy three children’s plastic paddling pools and these were slipped underneath the barrels before they were loaded on to a truck.

Back at the medical examiner’s office, the barrels were opened and, as expected, each contained the severely decomposed body of a female. Both women had been beaten to death with an instrument, probably a hammer, and had been dead for some years.

The first body was fully clothed. The second was wearing only a T-shirt and in its mouth was a denture which was broken in two. Body three was that of a teenager and was wearing green trousers and a silver beret. Identification was not immediately possible and was going to take some days.

Over in Kansas, in Topeka, the two bodies found on the
Robinson property were identified by a forensic odontologist as those of Izabel Lewicka and Suzette Trouten: both women had very recently been reported as missing and were easier to trace.

A few days later, with the help of another forensic odontologist, two of the bodies that had been found at the storage depot were identified. One was Beverly Bonner and the other was Sheila Faith. Sheila’s daughter, Debbie, who suffered from spina bifida, was identified as the third body, by means of a spinal X-ray.

The case against Robinson was beginning to assume a structure, although there was the problem of jurisdiction in relation to which state, Kansas or Missouri, would be responsible for each murder. Eventually, it was resolved that Robinson would be tried first in Kansas and the date was set for 14 January 2002, before being postponed until September of the same year.

Inmate # 00456690 John E Robinson is currently on Death Row, Kansas, although the state has not carried out an execution since 1976. His current photograph and other details can be found on the Kansas Department of Corrections website.

O
ften the internet’s link with a murder is not that it was trawled to find the victim; instead, it is exploited to rally international support for the convicted killer. Yet, when I see a glossy, constantly updated website dedicated to promoting a Death Row inmate’s innocence, I smell a rat. What is the need for this global exposure, and what use are the pleas for support? And, more often than not, donations are welcomed, of course.

These sites are always maintained by the well-intentioned
anti-death penalty lobby, whose campaigning would be better served if they concentrated their efforts on genuine cases. In short, such websites seem redundant to me.

The thousands of people who visit them are mostly not professionals in criminology-related professions, so what of value do they offer in assisting a convicted prisoner to gain his or her freedom? Surely the inmate’s own attorneys are capable of presenting a well-balanced legal argument before the appellate courts without all the hysteria these sites bring with them.

As to the internet debate rooms that attach themselves to these cyberspace ventures like clams to a rock, more often than not they simply post the ramblings of the ill-informed.

All such websites, and Darlie Routier’s pages are not exempt, publish selective material favouring the prisoners concerned. Rarely, if ever, do they expose the full facts, so they are patently misleading: a smoke-blowing exercise designed to deceive otherwise honest, often gullible people into supporting a cause that has already been lost.

A glance at the self-serving site dedicated to Darlie Routier’s case alludes to ‘evidence’ that can prove this woman’s innocence of the stabbing to death of her two young sons. Documents and affidavits sworn by expert witnesses are listed. Case photographs of the badly injured Routier are also posted to gain public sympathy for the loss she has suffered: her freedom and the lives of her two children.

However, on closer scrutiny, the documents and ‘evidence’ contained within documents are revealed to be all but worthless, and nowhere do we see the horrific truth.

I have studied this website and I can state that there is nothing
here that will influence a court of appeal, and it is this – not the general public – that will be the final arbiter. In addition, I will note, in the wider public interest, that, while the pro-Routier camp pours scorn on the police and trial court’s actions, the public prosecutor has remained admirably quiet.

But perhaps the website is of some value in that it brings to light many red herrings. For its content and
raison d’etre
confirm the manipulating, scheming persona of Darlie Routier. The woman is the mistress of homicidal
trompe l’oeil,
for, despite her apparent wide-eyed innocent charm, she is one of the most evil and cold-blooded child-killers of modern times.

This is the story of the dog that didn’t bark in the night, and it is a fascinating and educational one at that, for it confirms the widespread and perfectly reasonable suspicion that pure evil lurks within the web.

In approaching this case, we should step back and look at the crime in its entirety. However, given that this crime appears to lack a motive, this particular picture of homicide has many components missing; pieces that are invisible to the human eye. Locating them may solve part of the puzzle; interpreting them and fitting them into the empty spaces to complete the picture is altogether another problem.

But this is no daub we will study so intently. The one we are viewing is akin to one of the masterly works of the Dutch graphic artist Escher, who is renowned for his dreamlike spatial illusions and impossible buildings. Like the murderer in this chapter, he was a wizard at deceiving the eye.

The analogy between Escher’s mesmerising work and the case of Darlie Routier is apt, because here we have an enterprise that millions of American citizens agreed was complete, only to
change their minds after a short time, so that they now argue instead that it is not. The US Criminal Justice system says that the guilty verdict is the genuine article, while a growing body of commentators have had second thoughts and now claim that the prosecution case fooled the eye, with the result that the verdict is a fake.

And it is for this reason that the life of a condemned woman hangs in the balance.

Most of my readers, particularly those with an interest in criminology and the criminal justice and penal systems, will know that many prison inmates, especially those convicted on overwhelming evidence and facing long prison terms, often appeal against their sentences using trivial issues in their attempts to overturn the sentence or have it reduced. They set their warped and deluded minds the task of convincing themselves, as well as one another, that they are innocent. In the end, so convincing are they that they are able to manipulate hordes of people into believing them.

Commentators on the serial killer Kenneth Bianchi, who continues even today to manipulate society, have termed his behaviour ‘fly-specking exercises’. Bianchi meticulously dots the ‘i’s and crosses the ‘t’s, looking for the smallest errors in his frantic yet pathetic efforts to gain his freedom.

We find exactly the same ‘fly-specking’ behaviour in the case of the cyber spider Darlie Routier.

Her conviction was seemingly watertight. Indeed, so strong was the ‘overwhelming evidence’ presented by the prosecution that the jury had no reservations whatsoever about finding Routier guilty of first-degree murder and the judge sentenced her to die by lethal injection.

This was a crime that sent shockwaves around the USA, so much so that, following the hysteria generated by the case, three books were written by well-established authors, each unreservedly portraying Darlie Routier as ‘the embodiment of evil’. Now, however, dozens of experts, including several who participated as witnesses, a juror and the author of one of the books that condemned Routier, argue she is innocent. Why? Because, by using the internet, she has convinced them, and the websites that support her cause testify to this fact.

Millions of US citizens believe that Darlie Routier is innocent and should be freed at once, after which, no doubt, she will ask for apologies and financial compensation for having been detained for so long.

Twelve days after the deaths of her two young sons, the police arrested Darlie Routier for their murders. The investigating team had no eyewitnesses, no confession, no apparent motive, and the boys’ mother had herself apparently been slashed and stabbed during the attack. One knife wound missed her carotid artery by two millimetres; any closer and she would have bled to death.

What investigators did have by way of physical evidence was a trail of drying blood. It started at the murder scene on the ground floor of the opulent family home and led through a utility room to a mesh window screen in the garage, where it mysteriously stopped.

Other than a knife-slashed window screen – the damage most certainly not sufficient to allow an intruder easy ingress and egress – there was no other possible entry point in the Routiers’ house. There were no signs of forcible entry at any of the other doors and windows, ‘all of which were secured and locked’, according to Routier’s husband, Darin.

This fact naturally gave rise to two theories: either the killer had a key to the house or garage, or the murderer was a member of the family. If the second was the case, only the mother or father, or the two together, could have murdered the two children.

The other significant physical evidence was a bloodstained butcher knife on which were Darlie Routier’s fingerprints. There were three mysterious fingerprints that couldn’t be traced to any individual whatsoever, and Luminol tests for the presence of blood showed that someone had tried to clean the washbasin in the utility room/kitchenette and a settee in the adjoining recreation room – where the children had been slain.

Finally, it was clear that the attacker had used a serrated bread knife from a drawer, but more about this later.

Almost immediately investigators were puzzled and started asking themselves a number of questions.

What was the motive for the murders?

If it was a robbery, why were Darlie’s jewellery and purse left untouched?

Why would an intruder kill two children before trying to kill an adult who posed a more serious threat?

The two boys were stabbed in the chest. Why did Darlie Routier suffer a neck wound and cuts on her forearm and shoulder?

Why would the killer, who obviously had no scruples about murdering a pair of small boys, back off when Darlie awoke, leaving a witness alive to identify him?

Why would he drop the murder weapon on the floor, giving Darlie, his pursuer, a weapon with which to fight back?

Why would he have used the Routiers’ butcher’s knife in the
first place? (Most assailants come to their intended victim’s premises already armed.)

Why were there no visible signs of an intruder having entered the house?

And, as the questions mounted, it appeared that a bread knife owned by the Routiers might have been used to cut the garage’s screen. Had the intruder used this bread knife to slash his way in? If so, how did he get the knife in the first place?

However, there was one question police did not ask themselves at the time, and apparently not one of the tens of thousands of Routier’s supporters has asked this question since. The Routiers owned a white Pomeranian, a yappy little dog, easily excitable, that barked at any visitors to the premises. Deserving of a damn good kick, it even snapped and tore at a police officer’s trousers as he walked through the house. The dog was also heard barking by the emergency dispatcher who took Darlie’s 911 call, so we know that the animal was around when the frenzied murders took place.

In considering this fact, my mind turns to Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel
The Adventure of Silver Blaze
:

And here we sniff our first red herring, for it is entirely reasonable to ask: why did the Routiers’ dog not bark in the night?

Following two contradictory statements by Darlie Routier, who claimed she was attacked by a black man who left via the garage, the police soon concluded that there had been no intruder that night because everything pointed to the crime scene having been staged.

Doctors who treated Mrs Routier’s injuries formed the opinion that they were self-inflicted, and the investigators’ suspicions were reinforced by a peculiar scene that was caught on videotape a few days after the double murder.

On 14 June, just nine days after the killings and on what would have been Devon Routier’s seventh birthday, Darlie drove to the cemetery with family and friends, wished her boy a happy birthday and then, in a joyous mood, sprayed Silly String all over the fresh mound of earth.

‘Here’s a mother who has supposedly been the victim of a violent crime,’ said Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Greg Davis, the lead prosecutor in the case. ‘She has just lost two children, and yet she’s out literally dancing on their graves.’

Within eight months of the crime, Darlie was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury in the Kerr County town of Kerrville, where the trial had been moved because of a welter of media hype and publicity. She seemed destined to be remembered as yet another stressed-out mother who had suddenly spiralled out of control. But over the years numerous news stories and an ongoing investigation by Darlie’s appellate attorneys have raised questions about what really happened that night.

Could it be that the police and the prosecutors manipulated
the evidence to implicate someone they decided must have done it? A growing chorus of internet observers believes so. A juror from the trial now says that he and his fellow jurors made the wrong decision. The author of one of the true-crime books has also changed her mind, claiming that the jury heard perjured testimony and were never shown photos that would have proved Darlie was a victim of a savage attack. Adding fuel to the fire, her defenders claim to have found over 30,000 inconsistencies and errors in the court stenographer’s trial transcript.

Even the most experienced legal eagles have found themselves sucked in by the Routier saga. In March 2004, in oral arguments before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals into whether procedural flaws were made during the original trial, the nine judges began peppering lawyers with questions on other aspects of the case.

Was there, they asked, an insurance policy on the children, which might have given Darlie a reason to kill them?

When Darlie talked to homicide detectives, did she make any kind of confession?

But the most baffling question about the murders has yet to be answered: why would someone show up in a nice new suburban neighbourhood, target a house on a well-lit cul-de-sac, enter through a garage screen window a few feet from a dog’s basket, navigate his way through a darkened utility room, grab a butcher knife from the kitchenette and then head into the living room to stab two boys and slash their mother’s throat? Robbery was almost immediately ruled out as a motive; nor, police determined, did anyone have a grudge against the family.