Anyone You Want Me to Be (22 page)

M
emorial Day, May 29, 2000, was a hot day in Kansas City. When he left the house, Robinson was tailed by the task force as he drove around Olathe and went to a grocery store to buy hamburgers and hot dogs. He was in charge of overseeing the annual Memorial Day barbecue at Santa Barbara Estates, and if he felt that he was being surveilled or might soon be facing arrest, he tried not to show any of his concerns to his friends or neighbors. They would see only the upbeat Robinson, who was always fast with a quip and a smile. Wearing a golf shirt and swim trunks, he stood by the side of the community pool and cooked the dogs and burgers for all who attended. None of those at the party could have imagined that detectives were sitting on the outskirts of the mobile home park following all his moves with long-range cameras, shooting pictures of Robinson telling jokes and enjoying the moment.

The next morning, the task force reported to Paul Morrison, and the detectives wondered if he was now ready to make the arrest. He wasn’t. The DA understood the full complexities of the situation and knew that if Robinson was ever charged with any of the murders of various women who’d been disappearing around him for fifteen years, this might well become a capital punishment case. In earlier decades, Kansas had had the death penalty but had gotten rid of it and then readopted it in 1994. Since then four men had been convicted of capital crimes, but all had had their death sentences set aside because of legal technicalities. No one had been killed by Kansas since the last hanging in 1965. That year had seen a series of executions, including the deaths of the
In Cold Blood
killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Morrison knew better than anyone else that getting a conviction in a death penalty case was only half the battle.

“Sixty-six percent of death penalty cases,” he was quick to point out, “are overturned on appeal. People don’t realize that. They just pay attention to the first conviction.”

He was absolutely determined to pay attention to every detail and was still not satisfied that he had all he needed to arrest Robinson and search his properties, his vehicles, and his storage units. In spite of the enormous suspicions that Robinson had generated for so many years, there was no physical evidence that he had committed a single violent crime. It was entirely possible that if search warrants were executed on his properties, nothing would be found. Once again, the authorities would have to release him to continue his on-line and off-line games. Morrison could not take this chance.

Over recent weeks, Suzette Trouten’s family members had received more computer-generated letters that had been mailed from Mexico and held Suzette’s signature. The letters claimed that she and her companion, Jim Turner, were having a grand time sailing the sea. Morrison was aware of these letters and also aware that the task force was itching for him to act. Robinson had been very active lately and there were concerns that he might leave town. If he departed the state or the country, everything would become much more complicated. The pressure was mounting on Morrison but he still wasn’t ready. It took one final set of developments to push aside his doubts that something had to be done.

The district attorney had learned from investigators that Robinson had recently hooked up with a woman from Tennessee on the Internet. She was divorced yet still living with her ex-husband and had an eight-year-old daughter. Robinson had convinced her to come to Kansas with her child and to bring the title to her car. By late spring, she’d packed her belongings and was ready to make the trip with the girl. In addition to this, the detectives knew that Robinson had met a seventeen-year-old mother who had just given birth. Her circumstances were so desperate that she and the infant had been living in her vehicle. If she would become his mistress, Robinson had promised the teenager, she could move down to his farm near La Cygne. The situation was strikingly similar to that of Lisa Stasi with her newborn daughter fifteen years earlier, right before the young mother had disappeared forever.

It was one thing, the authorities believed, to watch and listen as Robinson lured adult women to Kansas City motels and had violent, consensual sex with them. The police didn’t feel they could do much to protect these women—at least until a crime had been committed. Babies and children, however, were another matter. Youngsters had no choice in coming to Kansas or in taking up residence at Robinson’s farm. They were at the mercy of the adult world, and investigators tracking the suspect had every reason to believe that when it served his purposes, Robinson would have no compunction in disposing of them. The DA had seen enough. It was time to move.

On June 1, as Morrison’s office began preparing the arrest warrant, Robinson was busy at Santa Barbara Estates. Something annoying was going on in his neighborhood and he wanted the police to help him out. A teenager and some of his rowdy friends had been playing rap music loudly, and Robinson simply could not endure the sound. After Robinson had asked a seventeen-year-old to turn it down, the two of them had exchanged words and gotten into a scuffle. Robinson called the cops, who showed up and took a statement from him about the rudeness and violence of these young people. The officers handling the call had no idea that they were speaking with someone who’d been under constant police surveillance for weeks. They took his complaint and arrested the young man, placing him in the Johnson County Juvenile Detention Center.

Robinson went to bed.

T
he mobile home park where Robinson lived held mostly pastel colored trailers set quite close together. Lots were cramped and lawns were sparse. Although many families had lived here for years, the place retained a feeling of transience and everything about it seemed a long way from Santa Barbara, California, or the notion of an estate. The Robinson residence at 36 Monterey Lane had a screened-in porch, which gave it more style than most of the others, yet it still appeared unsubstantial. A late-afternoon tornado of the kind this part of the country was known for could easily rip through the park, uproot the homes, kill the inhabitants, and instantly turn everything into rubble.

At just after 10
A
.
M
. on Friday, June 2, plainclothes detectives pulled up in front of Robinson’s address and quieted the engines of their nine unmarked police cars. Law enforcement surrounded the property, which held pink geraniums in front, a prominent statue of the Virgin Mary in a flowerbed, and a shed for gardening out back. As Robinson’s next-door neighbor Henry Timmons, a seventy-nine-year-old man who’d come outside to take a walk, looked on in disbelief, several detectives knocked on Robinson’s door and were let inside. Timmons could never have guessed what was going on inside the Robinson household.

Detective Jack Boyer was one of those who entered the home that morning, and he’d been waiting a long time to do what he did next. By now Boyer had his own investment in the case. He’d spoken with people whose relatives were missing or dead, and he felt some of what they were feeling. He’d spent almost three months tracking Robinson and had been amazed at where the trail had led and how many lives were disrupted by the man. Boyer had had to control his desire to make this arrest but now the moment had come. For a while, the men spoke politely with one another, Robinson uneasy about what these men were doing in his home. His day had already gotten off to a rocky start. That morning, he and Nancy had argued over Barbara Sandre. Nancy knew that her husband was still involved with the woman she had once sent a letter to. But she didn’t know that her husband and Sandre had talked about leaving the country or that Sandre had already gone ahead and started looking for a furnished apartment for the two of them in Toronto.

“I left early that morning for work,” Nancy has said. “I was very angry with John over Barbara Sandre. She’d been in and out of our marriage for thirty-five years. I tried to tell Barbara that we were married. I sent her a letter and explained our life in chronological order and explained about our children. We were getting ready to have it out.”

Robinson was preparing for another day of managing all the other women in his life when someone knocked on his front door. The police were standing in front of him and he let them inside his home. They had a search warrant for his properties.

“We told him why we were there,” Boyer says. “We told him we wanted to talk to him about a couple of complaints that we’d received about him. He sat down and talked to us about that and he got a little nervous.”

The longer Boyer spoke, the more Robinson’s agitation increased, in his facial expressions and body language. The detective noticed the man’s growing discomfort and was pleased to see it. For once Robinson was not so glib or talkative. He was used to being in control of things, particularly at home, but his discomfort was about to get much worse. The detective started to explain why they were paying this unexpected visit and how a couple of women had come forward recently and accused him of sexual assault. His threatening tactics against Neufeld had backfired. She’d gone to the police, despite his having nude pictures of her. And his rough treatment and dismissal of Milliron had caused her to contact the authorities as well. They were not so intimidated by the man that they’d refused to seek some help and some justice. Someone had finally decided to fight back.

“When I mentioned some of the charges,” Boyer says, “I think he was a little shocked.”

Then Boyer shared a few more details from the months-long investigation into Robinson. He looked much more surprised a few minutes later when the detective brought up Stasi and Trouten. He went pale and got quiet. The glibness he almost always used with strangers had entirely disappeared.

“Now he was really shocked,” Boyer says. The shock deepened when they arrested him, cuffed him, and led him outside.

Robinson’s neighbor Henry Timmons watched what was unfolding and wondered what the man next door had done to generate so much attention from law enforcement. To Timmons, Robinson had always seemed friendly but preoccupied, in a hurry to get someplace right now. But this morning, as he was being escorted outside by the cops to one of their cars, he’d lost the quickness in his step and the confidence in his eyes. He wasn’t smiling at anyone. He was frowning straight ahead and looked stunned, perhaps even ashamed, as he quietly ducked into the car and was driven away to the Johnson County Adult Detention Center. It was set right across from the courthouse holding Paul Morrison’s office. In early June, the courtyard separating the courthouse from the administration building was filled with people sitting in the sun and talking or eating their lunch or having a cigarette. The fountain holding the sculptures of two pioneer children was shooting a stream of water into the air. The quaint, innocent scene at first appeared to be an unlikely setting for the lurid stories that were about to emerge from Olathe.

Later that day, Robinson was questioned in a conference room with Trouten’s photo on one wall and a map with directions to Robinson’s farm on another. He was booked on sexual assault charges against Jeanna Milliron and for stealing $700 worth of sex toys from Vickie Neufeld. He was placed in solitary confinement and his bond was set at $250,000.

As the police continued their work at Santa Barbara Estates, other Robinson neighbors came outside to stare at the activity and to gossip among themselves. A few of the women had heard Robinson make suggestive or salacious remarks to them, but none had regarded him with genuinely serious suspicion. What could he possibly be involved in that was dangerous enough to provoke this kind of response?

Detectives Dawn Layman, Dan Owsley, and Mike Lowther went through everything inside Robinson’s home and cataloged or carried out one item after another, including his five computers and the floppy disks he’d used with them. The office was cluttered and held two computers, a printer, and other business machines. So many framed documents were on the wall it resembled a doctor’s office. They spent about five hours taking photographs of the property, rummaging through the mobile home’s belongings, searching his office and white pickup truck, dusting objects for fingerprints, and collecting evidence. They found a blank sheet of stationery that Lisa Stasi had signed way back in January 1985. Robinson had kept it for more than fifteen years. There was an envelope addressed to a Marty Elledge, later discovered to be one of Lisa’s relatives. The police also retrieved receipts from the Rodeway Inn—pieces of paper showing that Robinson himself had checked Stasi out of that hotel on the day she’d vanished during a snowstorm.

The office also contained Social Security forms for Debbie and Sheila Faith, and e-mail addresses for some of the women Robinson had been speaking with on-line. The Lenexa police found a credit card bearing the name James Turner. There were two sets of computer-generated business cards for Hydro-Gro, Inc., one set with “James Turner, Vice-President—Finance,” the other with “John E. Robinson, International Operations.” They located an application for articles of corporation for this company from Beverly Bonner. There was also a fax of a credit application to Gateway 2000, signed by B. J. Bonner and dated May 11, 1998. They uncovered documents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the State Department. There was a checkbook issued under the names of John Robinson and Barbara Sandre. Two books were also retrieved about how to find foolproof ways of changing your identity in modern America.

The police took away coolers, large popcorn tins, and a toolbox from his gardening shed. They hauled off his truck. They carried out a fax machine and cardboard boxes, all of which were turned over to other authorities at the police department. One man prepared to do an “autopsy” on Robinson’s hard drives and disks. A computer forensic specialist in Kansas City named Mike Jacobson was assigned to decipher and list everything contained on Robinson’s computers that might be relevant to his crimes. Jacobson was confronted with a mountain of work—the computers held ninety-one thousand potentially relevant files—and all of Jacobson’s labor was surrounded by questions. What data or names or pictures inside the machines might give clues to the suspect’s behavior or cyber-connections? Which e-mails might open a doorway into his experiences with women outside his marriage? With whom had he been communicating online and for how long? Had Robinson used aliases and what chat rooms had he visited? Were there any links between his computers and any of the women who’d disappeared?

The challenges of doing this kind of autopsy were enormous, if not unparalleled. Like everyone else legally connected to the Robinson case following his arrest, Detective Jacobson was quickly placed under a gag order. He could not talk about his involvement in the investigation, but others with similar expertise could.

Special Agent Dave Schroeder worked with the high-tech investigative unit of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. He had a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and had been with the KBI for nearly a quarter of a century. Schroeder, who turned forty-two in 2000, was stocky, brown-haired, and wore a mustache. In years past, he’d been in the narcotics unit, but in the midnineties the KBI expanded its field of expertise to include computer forensics. By 1997, it had created the high-tech investigative unit, with four agents and a supervisor, to combat this new criminal realm. Computers were a hobby of each person in the unit, and to add to their knowledge they attended every training seminar they could. Schroeder is a member of the International Association of Computer Technologists, which offers certification and a networking system for people investigating high-tech crime. Because the Net crosses all jurisdictional boundaries, in his current job he’d worked on national and international cases. The evolution of his career mirrored the evolution of American society and crime at the start of the twenty-first century.

“We’re involved with almost any type of crime you can think of,” he says, “but mostly we’re involved with child pornography. We also deal with homicides, fraud, securities fraud, consumer fraud, and narcotics cases. Computers store information about who owes money and store recipes for making the drugs. These things used to be put on paper but now they’re stored electronically.”

Schroeder’s workload had expanded greatly in recent years because computers had become cheaper and people were buying more equipment and becoming more computer savvy. But they still didn’t know that much about how to destroy e-mails or potential evidence. Most people believed they were getting rid of information on their hard drive when they simply deleted it from their system. They weren’t—at least not until the space it occupied had been overwritten. And this was true for the space in as many as five distinct locations for one e-mail: on the sender’s hard drive or backup disks; on the sender’s Internet server; on the other servers of the Internet service provider and the major telecom provider; on the e-mail recipient’s server; and on the recipient’s hard drive or backup disks or any other system that the recipient may have forwarded the e-mail to. Once in cyberspace, an e-mail has a long-standing life that can be traced.

E-mails aren’t deleted, according to Schroeder, unless people take “fairly extraordinary” measures to remove them for good. Without those measures, technologically sophisticated detectives can retrieve them.

“We go in with forensic tools,” he says, “and change the way of thinking in the computer from ‘It’s not there’ to ‘Yes, it’s still in there and we want to recover it.’ There is software written strictly for data recovery, and people can go in for a substantial fee and recover what’s apparently been lost.”

The computer can also find what’s seemingly been deleted by searching through what is known as “ambient data.” Computers operate by filling up voids based on size parameters. To fill a given void, which has been created by a given command, the computer will grab data from a memory bank and use it to fill up the cavity. The information it grabs may apparently have been deleted in the past, but not completely deleted, so it can still be randomly accessed during this process. Computers, like any machine, run on technical commands, and one command is that until it fulfills its space requirements, it can’t move on to the next function. The ambient data that can be retrieved by forensic specialists often contains information important to criminal investigations.

“To the average user,” says Schroeder, “none of this process is visible or known. But that randomly selected memory could hold a blackmail attempt or an extortion plot or a murder scenario or child pornography or a critical conversation between two adults.”

When doing an “autopsy” on a computer, after someone has been arrested and that individual’s property has been seized, the authorities have to follow meticulously the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment rules regarding reasonable “search and seizure” or the evidence will never stand up in court. This creates enormously time consuming tasks and complexities. Most law enforcement people are used to getting a search warrant and going out and looking for a particular item. What happens if you obtain a warrant for someone’s hard drive but then you find things on the disk that you were not specifically hunting for? What if you are investigating one kind of crime but find evidence of several others?