Anyone You Want Me to Be (24 page)

S
aturday, June 3, was unusually hot for eastern Kansas. By 9
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. the sun was scorching and the air would turn more oppressive with each passing hour, pushing the thermometer past ninety. A few hours earlier, a band of police cars had left Olathe and driven south on Interstate 35, then turned onto Highway 69 and kept going south, passing through the town of La Cygne and moving on to the farm owned by Robinson. Present were the Lenexa and Overland Park Police Departments, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, criminologists, and the Linn County Sheriff’s Department. The group had brought along trained German shepherds, known as cadaver dogs. They’d brought shovels and gloves and all manner of forensic equipment, ready to set up a makeshift crime lab right on the premises, if necessary. They’d brought divers to look in Robinson’s snake-infested pond. The cops shot at the snakes throughout the day.

While the Linn County sheriff’s deputies were securing the perimeter of the property, others walked the entire sixteen and a half acres. It looked like an ordinary farm, with garden hoses, a wheelbarrow, and ladders stacked up against the side of the trailer. Johnson County officers videotaped and photographed the two trucks, the trailer, the shed, and the pond. They flew overhead and took aerial photos of the land, the layout of the buildings, and freshly moved dirt. Others examined the holes Robinson had dug in the pole barn and noted a two-wheeled dolly inside the structure. (Another dolly would be recovered from Robinson’s Dodge pickup in Olathe.) Investigators would eventually bring in a backhoe to tear up the barn floor, and sections of the walls would be dismantled. Others would lay out, in an open area, long pieces of plastic sheeting found inside the shed and examine them closely for organic material, such as blood or human tissue. As one group looked at the barn, the dive team peered through the muddy waters of the pond searching for anything unusual. (Later, when the pond was drained, they found an abandoned truck sunk by one of the previous owners of the property to prevent his ex-wife from getting it in a divorce settlement.)

Sergeant Rick Roth of the Lenexa Police Department used a pry bar to force open the locked door on the east side of the trailer. The interior of the trailer contained a couple of lawn chairs and numerous boxes filled with cleaning supplies. The carpet had been removed and the floors were bare except for a few patches that had been covered with white paint. The criminologists started scraping underneath the paint to look for blood.

The sun rose higher and hotter until it was overhead at noon. Some of the officers were growing discouraged. All were hot and getting hungry. Their enormous amount of work had turned up little. Maybe there wasn’t any real evidence at the farm.

Just before 1
P
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M
., Johnson County sheriff deputy Harold Hughes was working in the trailer when someone told him that one of the cadaver dogs had picked up a scent. Hughes went outside, where he and Sergeant Roth moved toward the gathering commotion by the shed. As they came nearer, they saw that the storage shed was surrounded by tall grass. In these weeds were lawn-mowing equipment, an outboard motor, some blue plastic barrels, and behind all this, two eighty-five-gallon, bright yellow metal barrels. As Roth studied the barrels, a German shepherd came up and sat down in front of them. The dog sniffed the air and then sniffed it again aggressively, a sign that it had picked up a strong scent. Roth was joined by Overland Park police sergeant Joe Reed, who studied the dog and looked over at Hughes.

Roth approached the yellow barrels, eased the first one away from the cluttered area, and rolled it on its edge. He laid it on its side and moved it to a clearing. As he set the barrel upright, he noticed a reddish liquid oozing from the lid and down the side. A German shepherd ran up and put his paws on top of the barrel. Roth went for the second barrel but didn’t lay it down as he brought it toward the clearing. Hughes joined Roth by the barrels and noticed a distinctive scent that he’d become familiar with during his twenty-eight years in law enforcement.

“It smelled like dead or decomposing something,” Hughes has said.

Police photographers snapped pictures of the dead flies, leaves, and mold covering the lids of the barrels.

Hughes, the leader of the crime scene investigation team, took out a pair of pliers and applied pressure to the metal band around the lid. He applied some more, gradually prying open the barrel. As he removed the lid, a vile smell hit him in the face, causing him to lurch backward. He regrouped and came nearer, looking down into the barrel. Roth did not detect the smell until now and would later describe it as “horrendous.” Hughes peered inside at what seemed to be decomposing flesh—a body with its head pointed down, sitting in about a foot of rancid fluid. It was bloated and purplish. The video photographer immediately climbed up a ladder and shot down into the open barrel, as flies buzzed around the rim. Then Hughes resealed the barrel and turned to the second one. Hughes and Roth put on latex gloves.

Following the same procedure, Hughes opened this barrel and was again hit with the smell of death. He glanced in and saw another mass of decomposing flesh. Inside, a pillow lay on top of the remains, which appeared to have been there longer than the first body. The video photographer, who was also a criminologist, shot more footage of the contents of this barrel. Then it was resealed and both barrels were processed for fingerprints.

Captain John Meier of the Lenexa Police Department was at the farm throughout the search. He’d watched Hughes opening the first barrel and was nearby when the detective popped off the lid.

“I’ve been a police officer for twenty-six years,” Captain Meier said later, “and I’d never seen anything like this. There wasn’t much body left inside.”

As Meier watched Hughes work, he speculated that Suzette Trouten might be one of the people in the barrels. At least that would tell the investigators that they’d been on the right track when conducting their surveillance on Robinson. But who was the other person?

The barrels were heavy—so heavy that the officers needed a winch to hoist them onto the back of a truck for the two-hour drive to the state capital in Topeka for autopsies the next day. The weight of the barrels, when they held a human body, would begin to raise questions that were never fully answered. Would it take more than one person to lift and transport the barrels, even if he had a dolly?

The discovery of the bodies set off a new round of procedures back in the trailer. Criminologists, who’d been collecting trace materials from the floor with clear plastic tape, now ran luminol tests for blood and other searches for biological matter. It had been a long and gruesome ordeal at the farm; toward evening the trailer was relocked and yellow evidence tape was placed around the buildings and the entrance to the property. The crew drove to La Cygne and back to Kansas City, preparing for more work tomorrow.

O
nce the bodies arrived in Topeka, a crane unloaded the barrels onto a wooden pallet at the morgue in the county’s law enforcement center. Care was taken not to stir up the contents. Dr. Donald Pojman, a pathologist and the deputy coroner of Shawnee County, Kansas, conducted the autopsies. The first barrel had been marked Unknown 1, and after it was reopened, Dr. Pojman saw that it contained a nude human form in the fetal position. He drained out the fluid, slid the body onto a plastic bag on the floor, and saw a female whose long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and whose genitals had been pierced with rings. The body was adorned with nipple rings connected by a metal chain held together with a silver butterfly pendant. A piece of cloth, like a blindfold, partially covered her face. The cloth was held in place by a rope. The left side of her head had sustained a severe injury. After the scalp had been cut open and peeled back, Dr. Pojman determined that the wound had fractured the skull and was consistent with a hammer blow. The “circular punch out” was 1
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/
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inches in diameter and had left bone debris in her brain. Dr. Pojman also noticed the lack of defensive wounds, suggesting that the victim had never fought back against her attacker. The doctor estimated that she’d been dead anywhere from a couple of months to a year. He cut off her hands so that others could process them for fingerprints. One of her rib bones was removed for DNA testing. Within the next few days, a forensic odontologist, relying on dental records from Michigan, identified Unknown 1 as Suzette Trouten.

When Dr. Pojman opened the barrel marked Unknown 2, he found a female with long matted hair, clad only in a sheer black shirt. Her head hung down in her body fluids and she was partially covered by a green-and-maroon-patterned pillowcase. Floating in the fluid were several fingernails and three pieces of silver duct tape. The doctor also peeled back her scalp where there were two overlapping holes in the skull above the left ear. The impact of the blunt trauma had left a hole measuring 2
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by 1
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/
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inches. These were also consistent with a hammer blow. She had a hairline fracture of the jaw and no defensive wounds. A rib was again removed for DNA testing. Dr. Pojman observed a more advanced state of decomposition in the second victim and estimated that she’d been dead from six months to two years. Her prints were so diffuse that they could not be processed and her hands were not removed. Unknown 2, later identified by dental records, proved to be Izabela Lewicka.

Detective Harold Hughes was present during the autopsies. From Suzette Trouten’s body, he was given the genital rings, the nipple rings with chain, the blindfold, and a dark-colored hair tie. From Lewicka, he was given the pillowcase, the shirt, and the three pieces of duct tape. Some of the cloth items were taken to a biohazard lab where they were frozen and preserved as evidence. Hughes also took the hands and rib bones and distributed them to other criminologists.

Rick Sabel, an eleven-year-veteran of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, took photos of the autopsies as they were being conducted. Like Captain Meier, he’d never seen or smelled anything like this before. He’d worked on many drug investigations and violent crimes, but he was now encountering what seemed to him almost a new level of evil. As he was snapping pictures of the bodies, a syringe holding the fluids from one of the victims accidentally slipped from the coroner’s hand and pricked Sabel’s flesh. It didn’t draw blood but raised the fear that he might have contracted AIDS or hepatitis or some other potentially fatal disease. He underwent six months of rigorous medical testing before he was pronounced healthy.

As the investigation continued that Saturday, a policeman phoned Steve Haymes to alert him of the discovery of the bodies. Like others who’d been pursuing Robinson for months or years, the Missouri probation officer was both appalled and relieved at what he was hearing. His intuitions about the suspect’s deep criminal past and his homicidal tendencies looked as if they were finally, a decade and a half after Haymes had first begun investigating, tragically proving to be correct. Haymes wondered how many more bodies were out there.

If the police had been busy during the first two days of arresting Robinson and examining some of his properties, they now got busier.

With the autopsy results in hand, forensic teams had a better idea of what to look for. They returned to Robinson’s farm on Sunday and spent almost a week taking blood and other biological material samples. The trailer, barn, and shed were scoured for murder weapons. They recovered nine hammers, two picks, and a chisel. Inside a small plastic trash can in the trailer, they discovered a roll of duct tape with bloodstains on the side. A piece of paper towel in the kitchen sink held bloodstains as well. Some of the evidence would be collected and sent to a crime lab in Kansas City, Missouri, for more thorough testing. They also found blood on the baseboard in the bedroom, containing hair and human tissue. Bits of the hair, when examined closely by the forensic team, had forcibly been pulled out. Several small bloodstains were examined and one was found to be an “impact stain” as opposed to a contact stain. (In an impact stain, the blood’s trajectory creates a splatter, as a hammer blow would make.) The blood on both the paper towel and the wallboard along with the hair and human tissue would turn out to be Trouten’s.

W
ith two barrels recovered from Robinson’s farm, Johnson County DA Paul Morrison now prepared the largest and most detailed search warrant his office had ever created. It listed Robinson’s alleged involvement in numerous homicides, his widespread Internet connections, and his penchant for the S&M lifestyle. Before its execution, the warrant was presented to the Cass County, Missouri, district attorney’s office, headed by Chris Koster. This step was necessary because Robinson also maintained a rented locker at the Stor-Mor for Less in Raymore, Missouri, and law enforcement wanted to search this location as soon as possible. If any further evidence was found at Stor-Mor, that would only add to the already massive complexity of the case, bringing in not only a new jurisdiction but a second state as well. If Paul Morrison had a lot of experience handling large and complicated criminal matters that were headline news, DA Koster had little. Morrison was older and ran a much larger operation out of Johnson County—his office employed ninety-five people and processed about nine thousand cases a year. He was a veteran at dealing with the modern media. Koster was handsome, fresh faced, and—some people said—quite ambitious, always looking for the next career booster.

On Monday morning, June 5, a cool day in Missouri, another caravan of legal authorities, led by DA Koster, made its way across the countryside, past the white picket fences and horse farms, on its way to Raymore. Cass County deputy attorney Mark Tracy executed this warrant on locker E-2, which had the letters SM written on its padlock. As police and investigators stood around waiting for the locker to be opened, uncertain what to expect, a van filled with warm pizza and hot coffee showed up. The food and drink would be necessary to keep the workers energized throughout this long day.

That chilly Monday morning, Loretta Mattingly, who ran the Stor-Mor office, was prepared for the arrival of law enforcement. She understood that they were coming to look inside the unit she’d rented to John Robinson.

“That weekend,” she said, “I’d seen the news that they’d found the bodies in the barrels on the farm, so I knew they were heading this way.”

Loretta had blond hair, bound together in a tight permanent. She kept a big plastic frog near the front door of her business, which croaked loudly every time somebody came in or went out the front door (on June 5, there was a lot of coming and going, and a lot of croaking, in her office). She was one of the few civilians present when law enforcement opened locker E-2 at Stor-Mor for Less.

“The police sealed off the place,” she recalled months after Robinson’s arrest, “and went out to his locker and cut the bolts and opened it up. No one had ever done that before. They quickly realized there were barrels in there. Three of ’em. With a dead woman in each one.

“They called the crime lab in Kansas City and told them to get out here. Then they went in and out of the locker the rest of that day and night. The prosecutors from here in Missouri, from Cass County, showed up and then the media. They came at three-thirty that afternoon. I was there when they first opened up the locker. One barrel was leaking because of chemicals in the body. The body had leaked out acids and the acid ate right through the barrel and it smelled bad and it still does out there. We bio-cleaned it but the acid from the body ate into the concrete floor of the locker and we had to replace the floor. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to rent that space again. The police stayed all that night and did a test in the dark to look for blood…then came back with a second warrant. They thought there might be a hatchet or a hammer in there because the coroner said that a blunt blow had killed the women.

“Everybody was here that day. Three county sheriffs and Mr. Wonderful—that’s DA Koster from Cass County. He’s from Harrisonville. That’s down the road and the county seat. He was grandstanding for the media. He said I needed to testify soon because I was getting old and needed to testify before I forget things. I’ll be sixty this year and that’s not old. You don’t forget these things.

“I never noticed what John Robinson brought in here. I never saw him transporting any barrels. He had a white short-bed pickup and I watched him come and go, but I never saw anything unusual. I wonder about his wife, Nancy Jo. She had her own rental unit out here and I met her at least once. She made no impression on me, not like he did. She left the area right after the bodies were found. I think she went down to Tulsa because she still has her unit and she’s sent in a check from there. I wonder if she’s really innocent about all this.

“I think those barrels here were brought in a long time ago—back in ’93 or ’94. Those women might even have been killed here. They were dressed up and had blindfolds on. I told the police that I think they were killed five or six years ago. All I know is, they’d been dead a long time. They were antiques almost. I had two customers leave here because the smell was so bad. But we didn’t notice it before they found them. It took them about an hour just to cut the bolts and open the unit. I watched this for a while, but then I came back in after I found out there were bodies in those barrels.”

Mattingly would one day testify that she did remember seeing Robinson cleaning out his unit sometime before his arrest, saying that a raccoon had gotten in there and created a mess.

Kevin Winer, a senior criminologist with the Kansas City Crime Lab, helped execute the search warrant at Stor-Mor. Among the items in Robinson’s storage unit were luggage, wood chips, a pink kiddie pool, paint supplies, and three barrels. The barrels were hidden by the clutter in the locker, much as they had been at the farm. Newspapers dating from 1992 were found near them. Two of the barrels were wrapped in thick, opaque plastic and further wrapped in duct tape and placed in the corner. All were sealed and had items stacked on top of them. One barrel was off by itself and had “rendered pork fat” written across its face. Opening Barrel #1, Winer observed a shoe, a brown sheet, and a pair of glasses. He lifted up the shoe and saw that a leg was attached to it. The barrel was quickly resealed. Two of the barrels were leaking badly, and Kitty Litter from a torn-open bag had once been spread around their bases in a vain attempt to mask the smell. Fearing that the barrels would leak further when lifted, an officer was dispatched to go purchase three children’s wading pools at a local department store. The barrels were then placed in the pools for transport to the Jackson County medical examiner.

Thomas W. Young, M.D., was the chief medical examiner for Kansas City and had overseen more than thirty-eight hundred autopsies. In Barrel #1, he found clumps of dark hair, a folded yellow bedsheet, a crumpled brown sheet, earmuffs, and a fully dressed corpse. The female body was dressed in size 14 stirrup pants, a tweed jacket, panty hose, underwear, a blouse with a multicolored scarf, and gloves that covered her hands. The woman had on one ornate earring and a Bulova watch with the time stopped at 1:22. Blunt-force injuries were on the left side of the head and on the forehead, but there were no defensive wounds. Dental records would eventually determine that Barrel #1 held the remains of the former Missouri correctional facility librarian Beverly Bonner.

In Barrel #2, Dr. Young found another deceased female, this one with long dark hair and dressed in jeans, socks, white shoes, and a T-shirt that read “California, A State of Mind.” Her upper denture had been broken in half and fractures were on the back of her head and face. The injuries were consistent with hammer blows, and this body had a broken right forearm, a defensive wound. The triangular shaped hole in her head was the size of an orange. When dental records failed to provide good enough information on the bodies found in Barrels #2 and #3, Michael Finegan, a forensic anthropologist at Kansas State University, was brought into the case. He’d once helped identify the remains of outlaw Jesse James and now looked at the evidence pulled from the storage unit. He determined that Barrel #2 held the body of Sheila Faith. Barrel #3 contained another, younger female, this one upside down, with long brown hair and wearing green knit pants, a green pullover shirt, and one sock. The final victim was a teenager with a degenerative condition and a misshapen pelvis: Debbie Faith, Sheila’s daughter. Like the other two females, Debbie had suffered multiple severe blows, about the size of a golf ball, to the side of her head, and her body showed no defensive wounds. Dr. Young thought that the three women, due to their advanced stage of decomposition, had not been dead for months, but years.

“I’m not accustomed,” he said, “to looking at bodies in barrels.”

With the discovery of the two bodies in Kansas and then three more in Missouri, Robinson’s bond was immediately raised to $5 million, the highest ever set in Johnson County. The investigation into the man’s on-line and off-line activities now mushroomed, with the task force growing to nearly forty members from both Kansas and Missouri. Some detectives traveled to Florida to look at his former property at Big Pine Key, others kept searching for more evidence at the farm and at Santa Barbara Estates, while still others made contact with many different people who’d once interacted with the suspect. A number of them had connections to the on-line world of sadomasochism.

“Some people came forward to talk to us,” says Detective Boyer, “and I’m sure some haven’t.”

As part of the education of Boyer and the Lenexa Police Department, the detectives became familiar with what had been described as the bible of the S&M culture:
Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns
.

“Some people are very embarrassed by the lifestyle,” Boyer says. “There are a lot of people in it, whether you realize it or not. They’re in it, but they don’t flaunt it. They kind of keep to themselves and they don’t want to be drug out by the media.”

But the media was suddenly intrigued with this subject and was all over the Robinson case. The
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
and
USA Today
published stories that the nation’s—if not the world’s—first Internet serial killer suspect had just been arrested in Kansas. The tiny village of La Cygne was quickly overrun with journalists from national newspapers and magazines looking for details and insights into the man who’d often passed through their community on the way to his farm. The problem was that virtually no one in La Cygne had been aware of John Robinson. Most people couldn’t have picked his photo out of a lineup or ever recalled meeting him. He’d kept to himself, quietly grabbing a meal or a tank of gasoline in the town before going about his business on the farm. The locals had had no idea who he was, and this was the last kind of publicity that La Cygne, with its colorful banners of swans hanging from light poles and its big white swan planters standing on street corners, wanted for itself.

As reporters scoured the Kansas countryside, police began searching for women who’d spoken with Robinson in cyberspace or traded pictures with him, but getting them to come forward was proving difficult. Any woman was naturally reluctant to admit that she’d once been interested in pursuing sexual or financial connections with someone who was about to be charged with killing at least five other women. Some officers tried to match photographs found on Robinson’s computer with real women, and others attempted to match names they’d downloaded from his hard drive with the names of other potential victims. Robinson had used at least three cyber-aliases—Slavemaster, James Turner, and JT—if not many more. He’d sought out new women on numerous Web sites and chat rooms. All of this amounted to a massively entangled criminal investigation that would take a long time to unravel and catalog.

While some detectives hunted on the Net, others contacted Alecia Cox, who drove them to a fourplex at 901 Edgebrook in Olathe. She told them that back in 1999 when she was still involved with Robinson, the two had gone to an apartment here, which Robinson claimed to own. Alecia had seen that the apartment was unfurnished except for a few boxes, a computer, and several articles of women’s clothing. Robinson had told Alecia that the girl who used to live here had moved away with her boyfriend. Robinson and Alecia had had sex at the apartment and she’d picked out a few pieces of the used clothing. Alecia next drove the police to another apartment in Overland Park where Robinson had put her up for two or three days. This furnished apartment was where Barbara Sandre had once lived, and Robinson had told Alecia that it belonged to a friend of his who was out of the country. While snooping around in Sandre’s closets, Cox had noticed clothes that were conservative, dressier, and made for someone quite a bit larger than herself. If Cox had given the investigators some good leads into Robinson’s involvement with several women, she herself was shocked to learn from them that her ex-lover was a serial-murder suspect.

And she’d been living with, if not wearing, a dead woman’s garments. The evidence recovered from Alecia—a white camisole, a black velvet shirt, and a green velvet dress—would later be identified by Danuta Lewicka as having belonged to her daughter, Izabela.

Julia Brown, who’d once rented the Edgebrook apartment to John Robinson, told the officers that when the man had moved out in 1999 and the apartment had been inspected, the only thing left behind was an empty fish tank. The living room and bathrooms were filthy, with cobwebs everywhere and even the beginnings of a termite tunnel. The bedrooms, however, were meticulously clean and looked as though they’d been freshly painted.

“It looked like someone sucked all the dirt out of the area,” Brown told them.

Before forensic analysts could do testing on this apartment, the family living at the Edgebrook fourplex had to be temporarily relocated. Then investigators found blood splatters on one bedroom wall, and this blood, along with that from the duct tape taken from Robinson’s farm, proved to be Lewicka’s.