Anyone You Want Me to Be (19 page)

For the first time Robinson knew that the veil of secrecy that had surrounded some of the women was falling away. When Carol Trouten said she was going to the police, the conviction in her voice told him that she would follow through. He was still inviting new women he’d met over the Internet to Kansas City, but he was also talking with Barbara Sandre about leaving the Midwest and relocating to Canada with her. The pace of all his activities was picking up even more.

C
arol was not the only one speaking to the police about Robinson. In late March, the Lenexa Police Department in suburban Kansas City had also learned about Lore Remington and Tammy Taylor and their connections to Suzette. The cops were quite surprised at what they were hearing. If most detectives did not know a great deal about the Internet or the world of BDSM, they were now going to learn about the subculture of dominants and submissives, of bondage and discipline, and of sadomasochistic role-playing online. They also learned that Suzette had had affairs with Tammy and Lore, and both women were now extremely concerned about her disappearance. Lore and Carol communicated about Suzette, and the women were developing their own strategies to break through Robinson’s facade.

Lore knew Robinson in cyberspace as JRT or JT. After she began communicating with the police, she offered to use her on-line expertise to try to catch JRT in a lie or inconsistency. She would send him e-mail, get his e-mail in return, and forward it to the authorities. For the first time ever, a police department was using a civilian to investigate a homicide suspect in cyberspace. For decades, they’d used informants for other purposes, but they were now employing someone on-line to trip up Robinson.

As always, he was stimulated by the prospect of a new romance, thinking perhaps he could lure Lore to Kansas City. If she was interested in finding a great dominant in the cyber-world, he suggested, she should check out the address of eruditemaster, one of his on-line names. Lore followed through on this and the two began exchanging e-mails about establishing a master-slave relationship, but the trickery was about to take another turn. As they deepened their communications, Lore got a message from “Suzette,” assuring her that eruditemaster was a tremendous dominant and she should get involved with him. Lore also received Robinson’s favorite on-line picture of himself, the one of him standing out at his farm in his cowboy attire; he demanded naked pictures of Lore in return. The more Lore spoke to Robinson on the Net and the more that Robinson talked back—posing as both JT and Suzette—the more complicated the game became. Lore was certain that “Suzette” did not sound at all like herself, and she was increasingly worried that something terrible had happened to her friend. She was trying to “play” JT or JRT or eruditemaster to get a confession about a detail or a lie, but she was interacting with someone who’d eluded the authorities for decades when it came to connecting him with violent crime.

Lore expanded her strategy. She enlisted her other Internet friend Tammy Taylor to start e-mailing JT, to see if he would say anything to her that would confirm her own suspicions. Tammy posed on-line as a woman who was looking to become a submissive to a new master. She too was trying to play him for information and also wanted to pass the exchanges along to the Lenexa police.

Robinson was always open to more action and struck up a cyber-relationship with Tammy. If he was already extremely busy trying to keep all his identities straight and all his communications consistent, he suddenly got busier. He identified himself to Tammy not as JR or JT or JRT or eruditemaster but as someone totally new named Tom. He began instructing her in how to be a good slave and sent her e-mails from someone whom he claimed had been his submissive. The messages said glowing things about his prowess as a dominant and a human being. One such e-mail, from somebody referred to as “slavedancer,” described Robinson as “a true MASTER and a wonderful man.”

As the women tried to play their on-line target, he played them in return, step for step and move for move. Tom had become one more part of his multiple Internet personas. There was always someone else he was willing to be.

I
n March 2000, the police got a new tip about Robinson, from an employee at the Extended Stay America hotel in Johnson County, not far from the Guest House Suites. Robinson had brought another woman to Room 120 at this location, after he’d booked it for several days. He’d checked in and then she’d followed him to the room a short while later; they were holed up inside #120 long enough for the workers at Extended Stay America to wonder what was going on behind those closed doors. Their curiosity didn’t amount to anything more than that until one morning when the woman came to the front desk and requested that the clerk do her a favor. She wanted him to make a copy of some sheets of paper, and he complied, but one page got stuck in the machine and he had to run it again. He took the mangled copy and threw it in the trash, then handed the woman the good pages, which she took back to her room. When she was gone, the clerk’s probing mind got the best of him and he reached his hand down into the trash and pulled out the bad sheet. It was readable and looked like a contract of some sort—a document that said that a man was being given total control over a woman.

In Kansas, the authorities liked to know who was booked into long-term hotels, so each week these businesses provided the cops with a list of guests. When the detective came to pick up that week’s list at Extended Stay America, the employee mentioned this incident and turned over the page to the officer. The slave contract was vivid enough to get the attention of the entire Lenexa PD, which was already investigating Robinson. Its detectives, led by Dave Brown and Jack Boyer, began looking into his background, wondering if he had a criminal record. They were amazed and extremely concerned at what they found, so concerned that the department, under the direction of Captain John Meier, put together a task force to look into his current business ventures and his private affairs. Before long, one of the detectives picked up the phone and called someone who’d been thinking about, if not exactly tracking, Robinson for the past fifteen years. It was a call Steve Haymes had never wanted to receive.

“We tried really hard in the 1980s to put him away for as long as we could, where he couldn’t hurt people,” says Haymes. “In reality, he did quite a few years. He was in prison pretty much from 1987 to 1993. I think the hope had been that maybe some of our fears weren’t true and he was just more of a con man than anything else. And maybe the time in prison and the health issues had changed him, and maybe he was just burnt-out and tired and that was the end of it, but obviously, he’ll play the game till the day he dies.”

When his phone rang in early 2000, Haymes was about to be shocked by Robinson’s behavior all over again.

“The task force contacted me,” he recalls, “and said they needed to talk to me about somebody immediately.”

Later that same day, the detectives drove out to see him. Haymes welcomed them into his modest office at the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole, located behind a gas station and mini-mart in Liberty. Behind his desk was a picture of his children, the same kids he’d felt compelled to protect from an angry, vengeful Robinson who’d been released from a Missouri prison back in 1993.

He brought out Robinson’s files for the detectives on the task force and was surprised to hear what they were currently investigating.

“I’m not sure that in the eighties I believed that he would have done things with his own hand,” says Haymes. “He had certain people that he associated with, and at that time he might have had someone do his dirty work. But clearly now, by 2000, the appearance was that he was doing things with his own hand.”

Haymes was impressed with the task force—its growing size and seriousness—its determination to stop Robinson at last.

“They had a number of people working on it,” Haymes says, “and were investing a ton of time. But it was still all low-key and being kept very quiet.”

Part of the task force’s job was to send Dave Brown up to Monroe, Michigan, to talk with Carol Trouten and with Suzette’s friends and family members. They were desperate for information about the young woman. When Detective Brown told them that Suzette’s dogs had been found living with new owners, their worry moved toward panic. Carol believed that her daughter would never have parted from the dogs under anything resembling normal or safe circumstances.

Detective Jack Boyer was in contact with Lore Remington via the Internet and had established a dialogue with her up in Nova Scotia. She was regularly communicating on-line with “JT” and then forwarding her e-mails to Boyer. He studied them for any indication of what had become of Suzette. Boyer also wanted Lore to give him information about and insight into the bondage or sadomasochistic lifestyle, especially as it got played out in cyberspace. As a cop for the past twenty-seven years, he was certainly aware of the S&M subculture, but couldn’t claim much familiarity with it.

“We don’t get,” he says, “a lot of those kind of cases.”

He asked Lore to give him a crash course in its rules and practices and wondered if she could recommend some things for him to read. She did this for him and he provided her with guidelines on how to deal with JT without letting him know he was under surveillance. As Lore spoke to Boyer about tricking Robinson, the suspect sent out e-mails under the guise of being Suzette. It was a time of cyber-manipulation and game-playing all the way around.

While Boyer and Brown conducted this aspect of the investigation, Detective Dawn Layman was following Robinson in her vehicle, trailing him around Kansas City and staying on him when he left town to drive south on Interstate 35 and then farther south on Highway 69, which led him down to La Cygne. On March 29, she tracked him through the small town and across the Marais des Cygnes River and on out to his farm, tailing all the way there unnoticed, before turning around and heading back to the Lenexa Police Department. She could see Robinson’s property, but the trailer was set so far back from the road that she couldn’t really get a good look. And neither the pond nor the pole barn was visible from the road. After discussing the situation with her superiors, Layman went back to the farm the next day to get closer and snap some pictures. She didn’t have a search warrant and she would later claim that one wasn’t necessary because there weren’t any No Trespassing signs on his property and no fence. It was wide-open for anyone who wanted to park alongside the road and walk the several hundred yards back to the trailer and the pond.

She carefully looked around the property, taking note of the pond, two pickup trucks, and trying to peer inside the windows of the trailer, but they were covered with black plastic and newspapers. She took photos of the trailer and the trucks’ license plates so she could later run the numbers and verify the owner. She also noticed a group of barrels, some blue and some yellow, standing by a small storage shed. After spending only about five minutes on Robinson’s land, she looked around again and then left.

A couple of weeks later, on April 15, she returned to the farm with another officer, and both of them noticed that the property was now marked with No Trespassing signs and a makeshift gate. They speculated that perhaps Robinson’s neighbors, who were fiercely protective of his privacy and their own, had seen her wandering on his land two weeks earlier and alerted him that someone had been snooping around his trailer and taking photographs.

Detective Layman couldn’t help wondering if Robinson had figured out that he was under surveillance—being watched and followed and listened to when he spoke on the phone.

T
he person in overall charge of the task force, which was expanding by the week and would reach almost forty members, was Johnson County district attorney Paul Morrison. For years his county had been one of the fastest-growing and wealthiest suburban areas in the nation. It had nearly doubled since the 1980s and was constantly adding new homes and businesses. Many people who had fled the complexities of city living had, like John Robinson back in the seventies when moving to Pleasant Valley Farms in Stanley, headed straight for Johnson County. The once rural landscape now felt like an extension of Kansas City, with its crowded developments, increasing traffic, and ever-present piles of upturned dirt, where more and more houses were under construction. To get away from the city and one’s neighbors, one had—again like Robinson in the late 1990s when he’d purchased his farm at La Cygne—to keep going south.

The forty-five-year-old Morrison had been born in Dodge City, Kansas, the home of some legendary battles between Western outlaws and lawmen, but he’d grown up in the central Kansas town of Hays and in suburban Kansas City, Kansas. His father had been a railroad man on the old Santa Fe line. Burlington Northern–Santa Fe freight trains still blew right through the heart of Olathe all day and all night long; they rumbled directly across from the courthouse where Morrison worked, and just a few yards behind the jail. Their whistles screeched to warn pedestrians and drivers to be alert and stay off the tracks, and amazingly enough, no one had been killed by a train here for decades. Morrison had grown up in working-class conditions, with early ambitions to be a police officer. He’d come of age in a tough Kansas City neighborhood and had closely watched behavior that had shaped his values, convictions, and career.

“There was a lot of bullying going on,” he says. “People getting beat up at the bus stop every day. There were a couple of intimidators. One of them ended up in the penitentiary. I remember one day on the bus a friend of mine was sitting next to him, and for no reason he just turned around and knocked his front tooth out. Back then, that was just kind of shrugged off as bullying. In later years, I thought that seeing these things when I was young was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

“Johnson County is somewhat isolated. Kids grow up here thinking this is the way the world is, and it’s not. So coming from a place like that gives you the ability to relate to many different kinds of people, which is a good thing.”

Morrison was the first person in his family to have the opportunity to attend college, and he decided to pursue a degree in criminology. He still thought he wanted to be a policeman.

“While doing those studies,” he says, “I realized that if I got to be a cop, I wasn’t immediately going to be elevated to Sherlock Holmes status. I started to think about being a lawyer, with the idea of becoming a prosecutor.”

His path to the bar was not straight. After one year of college at Kansas State University in Manhattan, he dropped out to become a bricklayer’s apprentice.

“I always tell people that if I’d been successful at laying brick,” he says, “I’d be doing that instead of trying cases. But I got laid off and went back to school.”

In 1977, he graduated from Washburn University in Topeka and then studied law there for the next three years. In 1980, he went to work as an assistant district attorney in Johnson County, where he quickly proved himself a good trial lawyer. With his balding head, full dark mustache, penetrating blue eyes, and folksy manner, he conveyed shrewdness, toughness, an aggressive competitiveness, and moral authority. Juries believed him and he was soon climbing the rungs of professionalism in the DA’s office. He prosecuted the full range of felonies and became head of the narcotics unit. Then he began taking on the biggest murder cases in the office. He liked being in the courtroom and arguing in front of judges, developing an excellent reputation in law enforcement circles. He enjoyed talking to jurors and getting convictions against people who occasionally reminded him of the bullies back in his old neighborhood. He was hands-on at trials and wanted to keep things that way, but by the late eighties others inside the office were encouraging him to become the next Johnson County DA.

“I just wanted to try cases,” he says, “but I kind of got talked into running for DA. I was actually very apolitical, but things turned out all right.”

In 1989, he was elected district attorney and was now responsible for the cases generated by sixteen different police jurisdictions, yet he still found time to prosecute the major homicides himself. In 1990, he successfully prosecuted Richard Grissom Jr., a serial killer who’d murdered three young women. Their bodies were never found but Morrison was able to get a conviction and gained national publicity by using DNA evidence, considered novel at that time. Half a decade later, Morrison took on the even more notorious case against Dr. Debra Green, who tried to poison her husband and then deliberately burned down her mansion, killing two of her three young children (Officer Kyle Shipps of the Prairie Village Police Department, who was married to John Robinson’s daughter Christine, played a small role in this case). Again, the DA won a conviction and solidified his reputation as an experienced prosecutor who was as good in the courtroom as he was in laying out legal strategy.

“In this business, you’re only as good as your last case,” says Morrison from his office in Olathe. Behind him a huge window reveals the new Johnson County administration building with its high clock tower and open courtyard, featuring a gazebo. In summertime, local people hold barbecues in the courtyard, which brings a small-town, homey feeling in the midst of these government buildings. Near the gazebo is a water fountain holding a sculpture of two young pioneer children who are looking optimistically out toward the future. The old Santa Fe Trail ran right by here, and the sculpture is meant to embody its spirit.

Something about Morrison conjures up an old-fashioned lawman. The Wyatt Earp coffee cup sitting on his desk reinforces this impression. The sound of a yammering police radio fills his spacious office, coming from his secretary’s desk in the adjacent room. The radio is a symbol of just how closely Morrison monitors what’s going on in his county.

“This is a great job,” he says, leaning back in his chair and locking his fingers behind his head, “because the war on crime is a local war. The U.S. attorneys’ job is important, but they don’t affect things the way we do at this level. As I’ve gotten older, the good thing for me has been the opportunity to be a lot more involved with public policy issues.”

In recent years, Morrison’s office has created model programs that target high-risk offenders in the community, programs that focus on juvenile crimes, programs that focus on preventing domestic violence and on marshaling local citizens to get involved in crime prevention. Morrison has also been instrumental in innovative ideas for sentencing felons. And he has kept trying and winning cases, setting the example for the thirty other lawyers in his office. Their overall conviction rate well exceeds the national average.

Morrison has three children, and when not working, he and his wife, Joyce, are instructors at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Shawnee, Kansas. They teach young couples in the marriage preparation program about what to expect after their wedding.

“It’s all about marriage,” he says, “and it’s not really very religious. It’s about living together and getting along. People who have been married a long time tell you what to expect—and you’re not going to get this from your parents.”

By the late winter of 2000, all of his years of legal preparation and all of what he knew about being patient and thorough were going to be necessary tools for what he was facing in the early stages of the Robinson investigation. Nothing this entangled and multidimensional had ever before come across his desk.

“We had issues related to multiple states and jurisdiction,” he says. “We had an investigation that had taken about fifteen years and some of it had occurred out of state. We had financial and computer issues. This case is almost as complex as it gets.”

The DA, along with many other criminal justice personnel in both Kansas and Missouri, was painfully conscious that long ago John Robinson had managed to walk away from the disappearances of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine Clampitt. Now it seemed that he may have returned to the game of hunting female prey and killing them by luring them to Kansas through the Internet. Morrison and those on the task force were extremely aware of the con man’s ability to work the legal system to his advantage and to escape being connected to crimes of violence because of a lack of evidence. He’d slipped through their grasp time and time again, before going back to his old behavioral patterns. Instead of being changed or rehabilitated, he’d only grown into a more and more sophisticated adversary, which is typical of serial offenders.

For all these reasons, when Morrison launched the new investigation in March 2000, he was absolutely determined that if the man was arrested this time over the disappearance of Suzette Trouten, the charges had to stick. They could not proceed until they were ready and had solid evidence. As of April 2000, even though they were continually surveilling Robinson and had many suspicions, they had little real evidence to go on. They needed a break.

As in many other jurisdictions and many other cases, these dynamics created tension between the DA’s office, the police investigating Robinson, and the families whose daughters were missing. Once Robinson had been singled out as the chief suspect in the Suzette Trouten case, there was pressure to move forward and see him arrested. Morrison would not be budged. The investigators still didn’t have enough even to get search warrants for his home and farm. They needed witnesses and physical evidence before they could make their case.

If Robinson was arrested, Morrison himself would prosecute the defendant, along with Assistant DA Sara Welch. Morrison wasn’t going to go to war until he was prepared and certain that he could win. This time there couldn’t be any mistakes.

“I’m pretty invested in this case,” Morrison once said, when talking about Robinson. “The amount of victimization that he has wrought on people is beyond comprehension. In so many ways, everyday people have been victimized by him, and from that standpoint, it’s extraordinarily important that he be stopped.”