Anyone You Want Me to Be (30 page)

Fittingly, the first trial of someone accused of being a cyber serial killer was taking place in a modest Midwestern setting and was filled with the testimony of modest-looking people. One could not have guessed the erotic lives of these witnesses by glancing at them or known how deep the need for escape ran inside them. Individuals were never quite what they seemed to be; they were often much more than one imagined. High school students don’t often picture the prospect of grandmothers (like Jean Glines) having phone sex with alleged murderers (like John Robinson). The trial was, in some ways, about sex among unglamorous people and how the Internet had unleashed so many pent-up possibilities. The case evoked all the questions and mysteries about human desire and the human longing for connection.

On the trial’s third day, a local radio personality named Randy Miller sent one of his minions out to the courthouse to give away T-shirts. They were emblazoned with the words “John E. Robinson Trial 2002 Roll Out The Barrels.” In smaller letters, the shirts read, “Of Evidence.” The incident outraged the defense team, which asked for a change of venue. Judge Anderson denied their request, but was agitated over the matter. From the bench, this gray-haired, stern-looking man, who projected complete humorlessness, acknowledged that if he said what he really felt about the T-shirts, that would “not be a good thing.”

T
he state called 110 witnesses, including Izabela Lewicka’s parents, Don Robinson, Kathy Klinginsmith, Barbara Sandre, Alecia Cox, and Vickie Neufeld. After testifying, Don Robinson surprised everyone by walking over to the defense table and shaking his older brother’s hand. Kathy Klinginsmith had no doubt been coached by the prosecution since her outspoken appearance at the preliminary hearing. On this occasion, she did not say that Robinson looked evil (the kind of characterization that can cause a mistrial). While Kathy testified, members of Carl Stasi’s family looked on from the gallery, including a teenage cousin of Tiffany/Heather. The cousin bore a haunting resemblance to both Lisa and her daughter, who had by now grown up and become a teenager herself. Some people in court could not take their eyes off the cousin; it was as if one of the dead women had shown up at the trial of her murderer.

On the stand, Barbara Sandre looked mortified at having been dragged into this mess, Alecia Cox retained the confident swagger she’d previously displayed in court, and Vickie Neufeld seemed quite shaky. She was not pleased when defense attorney Jason Billam brought up that after she’d returned to Texas following her violent engagements with Robinson in April 2000, she’d sent him a positive-sounding e-mail about their time together. The complexities of adult sexuality had surfaced again. Quoting from her e-mail, Billam read, “These fantasies were pure joy and more fun than anything I’ve ever encountered.”

After listening to her testify, the judge told the prosecution that he wanted to throw out the sexual battery charge that Neufeld had brought against Robinson. She was not concerned for her physical safety when visiting the defendant in Kansas City, the judge suggested, but worried that if she didn’t go along with his sex games, he would not help her find a job. After some minor resistance from the DA, Judge Anderson dropped the charge. This meant that both of the original sex assault counts—brought by Jeanna Milliron and Neufeld—had now been tossed aside. Without saying as much, the judge had made it clear that if adults came together to participate in BDSM relationships, they needed strong evidence to accuse their sex partner of committing a crime.

The most intriguing prosecution witness was Nancy Robinson, who arrived in court well dressed and freshly coiffed. She wore a handsome cream-colored suit with a blue blouse, her blond hair sweeping around her cheek in a youthful curve. Despite her best efforts to make a good appearance, her mouth looked defeated and she walked with a slump. On the stand, she appeared to be working hard to maintain control of herself and not to show anger toward Paul Morrison. The DA remained cool. Morrison was relentlessly folksy, dropping his
g
’s from words like
talking
or
laughing,
but underneath his friendly manner lay a forceful prosecutor. When someone under oath did something unexpected and made him livid, as Nancy Robinson would while testifying, his down-home demeanor would suddenly vanish.

From time to time, Robinson’s youngest daughter, Christy, showed up in the courtroom as a spectator. She stared at her father with a fierce protectiveness and conveyed her love for the man. She gave one a glimpse into his home life, but not nearly as much as his wife did. Nancy made the Robinson household real as no one else could have. She described the three computers that sat side by side in the office of their Olathe residence. She’d used one of them to trace the roots of her family tree, and another was for her grandchildren to play games on. The third was the machine Robinson had logged on to in the mornings after Nancy had gone to work; this computer had guided him through cyberspace in his endless quest for more and more women. It had taken him into some of the darker recesses of the Internet and led to several of his affairs in local motels. But those affairs, Nancy pointed out, took place in the daytime. Regardless of what he did when the sun was up, she told the jury, “My husband was always home in the evening.” (Robinson was, as Morrison once told the
Kansas City Star,
an “8 to 5 serial killer.”)

During the trial, I couldn’t help looking at Nancy Robinson as a victim who was verbally, emotionally, and psychologically brow-beaten. I believe that she was dominated and controlled by her husband in every aspect of her life. She became dependent on him and as the years went by her self-esteem was affected. Her goal was to keep the family together with the hope that as her husband grew older, he would lose interest in other women. Unfortunately, Robinson and people like him do not change their interests; their need to take advantage of and harm others does not lessen. They will stop only if they are caught or die.

Under cross-examination by O’Brien, Nancy lightly ventured into Robinson’s family background, as if she were laying the groundwork for more psychological testimony to come. What she now told the court caused her to pause and start crying.

“His relationship with his mother was not very good,” she said.

“His mother was very cold. There really wasn’t a relationship between him and his mother.”

Nancy underlined the animosity between Robinson and his mother by saying that her husband didn’t even want to see his parents after the birth of his first child.

O’Brien questioned her in depth about March 1, 2000, when the DA believed that Suzette Trouten had been killed at the farm. Phone records had established that someone had made a call from the farm at 11:43 that morning. The prosecutors had used this phone record to conclude that Robinson had finished with the killing and was about to return to Kansas City to pick up Suzette’s dogs, check her out of the Guest House Suites, and put some of her possessions into storage. By October 2002, the authorities had spoken to Nancy a couple of times and had queried her under oath during the preliminary hearing twenty months earlier. During none of her prior discussions with the prosecution had she mentioned where her husband had been over the noon hour of March 1, 2000, but now she seemed to remember much more.

She told the court that at around 11:30
A
.
M
. on the first, she’d noticed John driving by her office in his pickup to go get one of his grandchildren at school. When she went home for lunch that day, both her husband and her daughter Christy were there. Nancy also said that when she came home from work that evening, John had cooked dinner for her.

Her testimony stopped Morrison cold, and now it was his turn to try to keep his emotions in check. On his redirect examination of the witness, he questioned why she’d never before brought up seeing her husband with his grandchild around noon on March 1, 2000. How could she have suddenly remembered that today? Nancy was unflappable. She deflected Morrison’s inquiry and stood by what she had just said—just as she’d stood by her husband since the early 1960s. Morrison looked incredulous. His scalp had turned pink but he decided not to push her any harder.

It was the defining moment of the trial. It was also the defining moment of the thirty-eight-year marriage of John and Nancy Robinson. If a determined group of women—Carol Trouten, Lore Remington, and Tammy Taylor—had come together to work with the police to get Robinson arrested, the women in his family had now banded together to try to save his life. No matter what he’d done, Nancy tried to convey, his virtues as a father and husband had to count for something. While testifying, she indicated that she’d considered divorce back when her kids were small, but she’d never taken that option because her children loved their father and “wanted him back.” In more recent years, she’d thought about leaving him again, but she “never went through with a divorce because of our granddaughter.” What she’d learned about her husband since his arrest had apparently not diminished her feelings for him. She told the jurors that she “always loved him but I don’t understand this.”

Murders often produce an odd chemistry. It was impossible to say what John Robinson would have done or how his criminal career would have developed if his wife and children had left him back in the 1960s or 1970s. But it was possible to believe that his domestic stability and the love of his family had anchored him in such a way that he could be relatively normal at home and a monster in other places. It was possible to believe that he could go out and do horrendous things knowing that he could always return to those who perceived him as a basically good and productive man. It was as if he had to leave the house to express his violence so he could come back and be peaceful inside the home. Then the rage and violence would build up all over again, perhaps from trying to be a good husband and father. He was like a lot of men who don’t fit that comfortably into domesticity; his solution was not to leave the marriage but to kill. The two things—the outer world where he unleashed his rage and the inner world where he tried to be loving to others—were somehow kept in balance for many, many years. Each one fed the other until he was caught.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about Robinson was that everything people said about him was true. He may have been a good father and grandfather and an asset in the community with his involvement in civic affairs. He genuinely seemed to like children. He was a decent provider and his four kids had all turned out well. When they came forward after his arrest and said they did not know the person they were reading about on the front page of the
Kansas City Star,
they were likely telling the truth. If the crimes in the paper were horrifying, there was something equally horrifying about living this closely to someone for decades and never peeking through his facade. The man who was on trial for beating Suzette Trouten to death with a blunt instrument one March morning had gone home that day and made a nice dinner for his wife. He was considered an excellent baby-sitter for his grandchildren.

What was more terrifying than how deeply our own minds could fool us?

Nancy was not present for the trial’s most lurid part. On Monday morning, October 14, the prosecution presented the video of Robinson and Suzette having sex in the motel room, which had been seized during a search of his Olathe storage locker. The thirty-nine-minute film was not shown until after the prosecution and the defense had argued heatedly in front of the judge without the jury present. Ironically, Morrison and Welch only wanted the jurors to see six minutes of the tape. The defense countered by saying that the edited version was misleading and biased, showing their client in a highly negative light; if the jurors were going to see any of it, they should see all of it. After ruling in the defense’s favor, the judge announced that anyone under the age of eighteen had to leave the courtroom. The jurors were brought in, the lights were dimmed, and a screen was lowered right in front of the jury box and the defense table.

The tape began with a radio playing in the background in the motel room and a naked Suzette lying on a bed and penetrating herself with a buzzing dildo. The businesslike atmosphere of the courtroom had immediately shifted. It was as if everyone had been thrown into the middle of an XXX-rated theater. As the sex and the chatter unfolded in front of reporters, legal personnel, spectators, and one nun (there to support the death-penalty defendant), people had different reactions. The judge and all of the attorneys looked down, acting as if they were trying to take notes, but that’s hard to do in the dark. The journalists craned their necks to see everything on the screen. An elderly couple in the gallery stared at the screen with stunned expressions, and some jurors had covered their eyes. Even with eyes covered, one could still hear the echo of the buzzing dildo throughout the courtroom and the demeaning violence of Robinson’s words directed at Suzette, as he called her a “bitch” and a “slut” and a “whore.” As for the defendant, he now came alive with what seemed to be pleasure for the first and only time during the six weeks of jury selection and testimony. He leaned over in his chair as far as he could to get a better look at the action, and he appeared quite pleased with his performance.

Thirty-nine minutes is a very long time. Halfway through the tape, people were looking at their watches and doing other things to avoid the porn film. It was extremely strange to see the defendant prancing around nude, just a few feet from the jurors’ faces. When the tape approached its conclusion and the golf balls emerged from Suzette, this only added to the shock permeating the room. What made the scene even more surreal was that as the video neared its end and the sex finally stopped, everyone saw a fragment of
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
pop up on the screen. Nothing could have underscored Robinson’s double life, as doting grandfather and sexual predator, any better. When the tape was at last over and the court took a recess, several women gathered in the rest room and reviewed what they’d just seen. A couple said they could only attribute the stamina of Robinson, who was fifty-six when the video was shot, to Viagra.

The next civilian witness was the deeply religious Retia Grant, one of Robinson’s neighbors at his farm. She was a great relief from the tensions and strain that had accumulated in the courtroom during the film, and she brought with her some much needed comic relief. In detail, she described how, in the fall of 1999, she’d inadvertently come up on Robinson in his barn when he was digging two trenches. She talked about how she’d startled him that day and the obscenities he’d aimed at her because of this. Retia was moving along fine through her testimony until Sara Welch asked her to repeat for the jurors the expletives Robinson had used after she’d surprised him.

This was more than the devout Retia could do. She didn’t use that kind of language anytime or anywhere and she could only convey such thoughts by saying “blankety-blank.” She did this for the jury until Welch, who was not at all prissy, insisted that the witness be more explicit. When Retia still balked, Welch explained to her that this was the one and only time in her life it was not only all right to use bad language, it was necessary.