Dead Men Talking (6 page)

Then in August, Izabela Lewicka disappeared and was never heard from again. Police believe that she was killed and disposed of around that time. However, her parents continued to receive emails purportedly from their daughter up until Robinson’s arrest. In the final months, John said that she was always travelling in some exotic land. In one of her last ever emails, she claimed to have just returned from China.

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‘The Slavemaster’ soon returned to the world of sadomasochistic chatrooms. He made contact with Suzette Trouten, a bored 27-year-old licensed nurse from Newport, Michigan, who lived a double life; nurse by day, submissive slave by night. A substantially built young woman with a mass of bubbly brown hair, 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.

Suzette had pierced not only her nipples and navel but also five places in and around her genitalia, all to accommodate rings and over devices used in BDSM rituals. A photograph of Suzette, with nails driven through her breasts, had been circulated on the internet and it must have acted like a magnet to JR. Quite understandably, a relationship soon 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 in Kansas City there was a limousine waiting at the airport to meet her.

The job, JR 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. JR neglected, however, to mention that the only way to have contact with his father would be through the use of an Ouija board or a medium, as the old man had been dead for some ten years. But as we have already established, JR was not a man to let such trivial details inhibit his grand design, so 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. In fact she also gave her mother JR’s telephone numbers – giving police a lead to follow when she later disappeared in March. She also discussed the job offer with Lore Remington, an eastern Canadian friend. The two women had met in a chatroom and shared an interest in BDSM. Later Suzette introduced Lore to JR on the internet, and they too developed a long-distance, dominant-submissive, cyber-sex relationship.

In February 2000, Suzette rented a truck, loaded it with her belongings and headed off to her new life in Kansas City. Along with her clothes, books, a collection of teapots, and the two Pekinese, she took with her an array of BDSM accessories, including whips, paddles, handcuffs, various lengths of chains, numerous items made from rubber, and just about anything else that a self-respecting, bona-fide BDSM enthusiast might care to invent. And, on John’s insistence, and although he had no interest in the game, she also purchased two golf balls (brand name undetermined) and a length of elastic, but more this later.

Lenexa is a busy 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 Monday, 14 February 2000. He had reserved accommodation for her, specifically Room 216 at the Guesthouse Suites, an extended stay hotel. Claiming that they didn’t allow pets at the hotel, he told her that he had generously arranged for her dogs, Peka and Harry, to be boarded at the kennels of the Ridgeview Animal Hospital in Olathe.

As soon as 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 her mother, Carolyn, ‘was a kind of mama’s girl’. While she was in Kansas, she phoned her mother every day, keeping her informed of how things were going and, although Mom 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. Evidently, he was happy with her too.

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 Carolyn regularly before she disappeared. After not having spoken with her daughter for some time, Carolyn made a few discreet enquiries, then she picked up the telephone and called the police.

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

David Brown instructed the Trouten family and a few of JR’s acquaintances to tape their telephone conversations with him and to give the police copies of any emails that they received from him.

For several weeks after 1 March, Robinson spent time contacting Suzette’s submissive friends and some of her relatives by email, pretending to be her. Most weren’t fooled by the subterfuge. He soon dropped the act and set his sights on Suzette’s Canadian friend, Lore.

Lore and another Canadian woman began their own amateur investigation of the man they believed was named ‘JR Turner’. Robinson moved quickly after Lore told him she was interested in finding a dominant master for a friend. The emails and chat sessions turned to telephone calls, which were picked up by the police wire taps now in place. The Lenexa PD contacted Lore and told her they were investigating Robinson. They did not explain the extent of the probe, but asked her to continue the relationship.

‘The police didn’t tell me to get John Robinson to lure me to Kansas City,’ Lore said later at Robinson’s trial. ‘I was willing to help.’

Robinson made vague offers to Lore about meeting in her person. ‘He offered nothing other than I would be financially taken care of and never have to work,’ she said.

At the time that Suzette had been preparing to move to Kansas, the sexually insatiable JR, using the name James Turner, had established two more BDSM friendships on the internet. The first woman, Vicki, 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 find work in the Kansas City area.

Vicki arrived in Lenexa on 6 April and, while staying at the Guesthouse Suites, spent five days getting to know JR. During this time she signed a slave 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 before he told her to return home and prepare to move to Kansas City. She was, in many ways, and obvious choice for Robinson… that is to say, she was vulnerable. She suffered from depression and a lack of meaningful companionship and was eager to change her life; she fell completely for Robinson’s ‘bull’. She returned to Kansas City 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.

Vicki later testified that he took photographs of her bound and nude and he hit her hard across the face. ‘I had never been slapped that hard by anybody before’, she later told the court. She also stressed that the photographs were taken against her wishes and despite her protests.

Fortunately for Vicki, the promised move to Kansas never took place. When 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.

Vicki’s response was to report the matter to the police, and was astonished to learn that all of her phone conversations with JR had been tape-recorded from the outset.

A woman called Jeanne was the second of the two women, and she turned out to be the last one to fall foul of ‘the Slavemaster’. She was an accountant and, after some weeks of preamble on the internet, agreed to become Robinson’s sex slave. In mid-May, she journeyed to Kansas for a few days with JR and was installed in an apartment at the Guesthouse Suites, who, by now, regarded Robinson as an excellent customer.

Later, Jeanne 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 Jeanne was ready, as instructed, when JR arrived. Yet she wasn’t prepared for what would actually happen. He walked into the room, grabbed her by her hair and flogged her brutally across her breasts and back. Like Vicki before her, Jeanne was discovering that JR was interested in a much rougher relationship than she had anticipated. 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, Jeanne’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, Jeanne became hysterical to the extent that after JR had left she 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 one John Robinson. Worried and distraught, she called the Lenexa PD, who, on hearing that JR was involved, gave her complaint the utmost priority.

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

The next day, Jeanne gave a full statement to Detective 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 statements made by Vicki and Jeanne gave police the means to justify the arrest of the man who had been the subject of their investigation into the unexplained disappearances of several women.

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For decades, JR had been baiting traps for other people, killing eight of his victims. But on Friday, 2 June 2000, the traps he had set for his prey ultimately became his own trap. It snapped shut when nine police cars drove up to 36 Monterey Avenue, Santa Barbara Estates, and officers got out, surrounded the building and pounded on his door.

Detectives arrested John E Robinson and charged him with aggravated sexual battery and felony theft; by the end of the following few days he would have willingly have settled for such simple charges. Visibly shocked, JR was handcuffed and driven away to the red brick edifice which is the Johnson County Jail in Olathe, where he was detained on a $5 million bond. At the same time, police and detectives from a number of agencies, including the FBI, spilled from eight other vehicles and began to execute a search warrant for the Robinson home.

Inside, as well as seizing all five of JR’s computers and fax machines, police found a blank sheet of paper which had been signed by Lisa Stasi in January 1985, some fifteen years earlier. Along with this were receipts from the Rodeway Inn, Overland Park, which showed that JR had checked Lisa out on 10 January of that year, the day after she had last been seen alive by the inn’s manager and her mother-in-law. However, those first scraps of evidence were only the tip of a gigantic iceberg of evidence; far more would come to light over the next few days and it would mortify those who found it.

Although somewhat belated, the police investigation had been thorough and revealed all of the 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 rummaging through his storage locker in Olathe. Here, they unearthed a cornucopia of items connecting him to two of the missing women, Izabela 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. Along with Suzette’s things, they located Izabela’s driving licence, some photographs of her, nude and in bondage, a slave contract and several BDSM sex implements. They also located a stun gun and a pillowcase.