Anyone You Want Me to Be (25 page)

Another part of the task force contacted Barbara Sandre, now living in Toronto, who gave them permission to search the duplex in Overland Park. Like Alecia, Barbara was stunned to learn that she was part of a homicide investigation. Some of her possessions were still packed up at the duplex, waiting to be moved to Canada. Items seized from this location included an antique coffee grinder, a brass mortar and pestle, and several pieces of artwork, some signed “John 2000,” others “John ’92.” There were over a hundred books, most with occult themes. All had belonged to Lewicka. At the duplex, Sandre had neatly packed her linens inside a large plastic garbage can, which held some green-and-maroon-patterned sheets. When Detective Dawn Layman, who helped execute the search warrant at this address, spotted these sheets, she immediately recognized that the pattern matched that of the pillowcase from the barrel holding Lewicka.

On July 10, Detective Hughes executed a search warrant on Robinson while he was incarcerated in the Johnson County jail. The warrant allowed him to take samples of Robinson’s blood, saliva, and head and pubic hair. Robinson cooperated fully, pulling out at least one hundred of his own hairs.

By August, the police had accumulated reports on Robinson that ran to eleven thousand pages and would one day double that figure.

“This case,” Paul Morrison had announced to the media in one of his first public appearances after Robinson’s arrest, “has to do with the suspect having numerous contacts throughout the United States who share similar interests, over, among other things, the Internet.”

He added that there was a significant financial aspect to the investigation.

What Morrison didn’t say and what he couldn’t have known at the time was that Robinson’s wild ride on the Internet had almost exactly paralleled the dot-com boom that flourished throughout the late 1990s. Some investors made millions of dollars almost overnight and many people grew rich through the inflated stock prices. But then the bubble burst. One reason, analysts later speculated, was that everything had happened too fast and people had simply gotten greedy to make more and more. They’d overreached, and what had gone up began to come down. Now fortunes were lost as quickly as they had been made. Robinson had gotten greedy too. Before the arrival of the Internet, he’d managed to hold all of his scams and identities together. He’d been somewhat limited in the number of women he had access to at one time. Cyberspace had changed all that.

He’d used the Net to auction himself off to an unlimited number of female contacts. Then he’d picked and chosen among the most vulnerable or desperate, but his reach had also finally exceeded his grasp. By the spring of 2000, just as the dot-com businesses were starting to level off or tumble, Robinson could no longer micromanage everything and everyone he needed to. His hunger for more and more women finally consumed him. And then his bubble burst.

B
efore long, investigators had linked to Robinson a sixth missing person, Lisa Stasi, and then a seventh, Catherine Clampitt, and then an eighth, Paula Godfrey. No one knew what the final number might be. Apparently, no one knew much about Robinson, either, including his wife and children. Following his arrest, they released a statement saying that they did not recognize the person whom media reports were making out to be a monster, the epitome of evil in cyberspace. That was not, as far as they could tell, a description of their husband or father, not the man who’d married or raised them. He couldn’t have been torturing and killing young women who were about the age of his own daughters, not while he was doing everything else with them, could he?

That kind of beast was not anyone his family had ever seen—and they’d been living with or interacting with him throughout the past several decades. If the reports were true and Robinson had really done these horrific things to the victims, then he must have been someone very different from the person they perceived. His life must have had parts that were never allowed to touch one another and that were always kept separate inside.

The police in suburban Kansas City had uncovered the trail of a serial killer, which in modern America was not that uncommon. As mentioned previously, the FBI has estimated that at any given moment there are between thirty and fifty serial killers in the United States, of whom ten to twelve are identified. Many of the unsolved cases are called “stranger homicides,” meaning that there is no relationship between the killer and the victim. These victims are quite easy for the violent offender to locate; every major city that has prostitution, runaways, drug addicts, and street people/homeless will have unsolved homicides. For years in Vancouver, for example, there were missing women who had worked as prostitutes. Until 2001, law enforcement believed that they must have moved on to another city, then four of these women were found murdered and authorities began looking for around fifty more who they felt might be victims of a serial killer.

Many people believe that all serial killers fit the same mold and follow similar patterns of behavior, but at the FBI, we discovered that this image is false. When I was transferred to the FBI Academy in 1977, I began doing research in the area of criminal psychology and the criminal mind. The majority of the research was from a rehabilitative perspective, correctional perspective, or probation/parole perspective. No research was available from a law enforcement or investigative perspective. Criminals were identified and labeled with psychiatric/psychological terms such as
psychopath, paranoid, schizophrenia,
etc. To complicate matters, when I interviewed people like Charles Manson, they were sometimes categorized as psychopathic and at other times as schizophrenic. These terms meant little to the law enforcement community and me. I teamed up with colleague Roy Hazelwood and together we came up with three categories for violent crime: disorganized, organized, and mixed. A disorganized killer is very much what the name implies. His crimes are random and a lot of forensic evidence is left behind because of the killer’s state of mind. Mental illness, drugs, and /or alcohol may affect the offender, and this will in turn affect the appearance of the crime scene. An organized killer, on the other hand, carries out well-planned and premeditated homicides, and little or no evidence is left behind linking the suspect to his crime. The mixed category often occurs when more than one offender is present at the scene or when a crime starts out well planned but then something or someone interferes with the perpetrator and things become too unpredictable or messy to control. By describing criminals and crime scenes in simple, understandable terms it became easier to profile crimes of violence. Although we had these categories, we found criminals may at times show elements from more then one category.

For example, the Nicole Brown Simpson case showed elements of both an organized and disorganized offender. The killer brought a weapon to the scene and wore gloves and a knit cap, all of which fit the organized category. However, the method and manner of Ron Goldman’s death was different from Brown’s. Some believe there may have been two killers and that would explain why Nicole and Ron were killed differently. It is my opinion this double homicide was the work of a single killer. Ron Goldman put up a stronger fight, and the killer did not expect this to happen. Goldman was slashed, cut, and stabbed before collapsing and bleeding to death. Nicole Brown, on the other hand, was struck in the head and was unconscious when the killer cut at her throat with such fury that she was nearly decapitated.

John Robinson appeared to be the organized type and in some ways conjured up John Gacy, who murdered thirty-three boys and young men in Des Plaines, Illinois. By day Gacy was a building contractor, was engaged in local politics, and had even had his photo taken with President Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn. Gacy dressed as a clown for charity benefits and was married, but by night he was a serial killer. He was very organized during many of the murders, but he finally grew careless and was eventually arrested. Serial killer Robert Hansen (fifteen victims) was from Anchorage, Alaska. The owner of a bakery, he was married and had two children, but when his wife and children went away on trips, he turned into a different human being. He took prostitutes in his private plane into the Alaskan wilderness, and after landing at a remote area, he stripped the women naked and had them attempt to flee by giving them a head start in the woods. Then he doggedly tracked them down, like a wild animal, killing them with a high-powered rifle.

Robinson was different from these men in one primary area: his long criminal history as a scam artist. Serial killers often have pasts that involve other violent crimes, but Robinson had seemingly evolved toward violence over decades. He’d graduated from one type of criminal to the next. He was always a work in progress.

The Kansas City area had seen serial killers before, but what it was encountering in June 2000 was different from anything in the past. No one had ever heard of somebody transferring his seductive and homicidal skills directly onto the Internet. No one had seen this coming. It appeared that the world’s first known on-line serial killer had just been uncovered in a mobile home park in a Midwest suburb. By the first week of June 2000, people were starting to ask a lot of questions about John Edward Robinson. What had he really done for a living? Where had his money come from? How long had he been able to get away with committing crimes? How had he fooled prison psychologists so completely? Did his wife know more than she was saying? How could he have evolved from a petty con man into the person the public was reading about in the paper—what had driven him toward such brutal acts? Why hadn’t anyone understood what lay behind his facade? And what was going on in cyberspace that the average on-line user knew nothing about?

Information about Robinson began pouring in from every side. As the facts piled up—outlining his long criminal record and a string of victims going back more than thirty years—the story stretched credulity almost until the breaking point. The facts also conveyed two fundamental warnings: monsters aren’t necessarily born but are made over time, and you never knew who you might encounter in cyberspace.

While the media looked for new angles and the police continued their investigations, the twin prosecution teams from Kansas and Missouri tried to find a way to work together to bring Robinson to trial. Almost from the start there was conflict. The case involved a myriad of crimes, five bodies found in two states, several different jurisdictions, three missing persons, a baby that had never been located, and a pair of DAs with distinctly different styles. If Paul Morrison resembled an old-fashioned lawman, Chris Koster evoked a handsome kid just out of college who was looking for a role on a TV show about law and order. Their backgrounds and experience added to the natural rivalry that had long existed between Kansas and Missouri—a rivalry that was about to resurface following Robinson’s arrest. Morrison had grown up in Kansas City, Kansas, while Koster, who was nearly a decade his junior, had been born on the other side of Missouri, in St. Louis. After graduating from the University of Missouri with a law degree in 1991, he’d gone to work in the Missouri attorney general’s office and then taken a job at a Kansas City law firm. Three years later, his public ambitions emerged when he won the district attorney’s job in Cass County, roughly half an hour’s drive south and east of Kansas City. In 1998, he won the office again.

While Morrison represented one of the fastest-growing suburban areas in his state, Koster’s jurisdiction had a rural feel and constituency. Morrison was used to managing and trying high-profile murder cases himself; Koster’s county hadn’t even had a homicide for the past couple of years. Morrison worked in a large office in a square, bland, modern-looking government building in Olathe. Koster worked in a small space across the street from the elegant nineteenth-century Cass County Courthouse, located in the town square in Harrisonville, which conjured up nothing so much as the antebellum South. With its stately courtrooms, immaculate wooden staircases, beautiful wainscoting, and crowning bell tower, the courthouse brought to mind another era and another period in the history of criminal justice, when men were summarily hanged for stealing horses. If Johnson County seemed Northern and urban, Cass County retained vestiges of the Old South. In the spring of 2000, such comparisons wouldn’t have meant much if things had gone smoothly after Robinson was taken into custody—but they hadn’t. Shades of the old interstate feud, fueled by the Civil War, were being rekindled.

Morrison’s task force had wanted to do everything exactly by the book so that Robinson would not only eventually be convicted but later lose when he tried to appeal his conviction; he’d wriggled free of the legal system far too many times in the past. This was one reason the DA had waited so long to arrest him. What Morrison didn’t want was anyone tampering with his view of how to handle the case. In one form or another, the greater Kansas City area had been victimized by this man for about thirty-five years, and unless due process was diligently carried out now, he might find a way to beat these charges. That simply could not be allowed to happen.

The first sign of trouble between the two jurisdictions came on July 6, about a month after the arrest. Chris Koster announced to a local newspaper, the
Democratic Missourian,
that his county was “ready to go” in the prosecution of Robinson. By this time, a preliminary hearing for the defendant in Kansas had already been postponed, until October, and postponed in Missouri as well. Koster went on to say that to speed things up, he was formulating a plan to transport Robinson back and forth across state lines so he could attend hearings in both states. The young DA, now taking on the biggest case of his career, seemedto be getting impatient with the process. If Kansas got to try Robinson first, and Missouri didn’t get to bring him to Cass County and try him for several more years, witnesses might forget what had happened and their testimony would end up being stale or something worse.

This was all it took to push Morrison’s legal and emotional buttons. These public statements were the kind of thing that could torpedo the best-laid courtroom strategies, even before they were initiated. If Robinson could somehow manage to turn this conflict to his advantage and go free again…. Nobody inside the Olathe courthouse wanted to contemplate that possibility. When informed of Koster’s quote, Morrison fired off his response in the pages of the
Kansas City Star:

“My understanding is there are serious legal problems with bringing a prisoner back and forth across state lines. We just can’t control the variables, and it would be an understatement to say we would be playing with fire if we attempted any of that.”

What Morrison didn’t come right out and say was that his county had been working nonstop on the Robinson case for the past four months and had done all the legwork leading to the suspect’s incarceration. It had employed numerous police and other investigators, had traveled around the nation hunting down leads and spent a lot of money doing this, had gone into the nether reaches of the Internet to find out what Robinson had been doing on-line, had uncovered the two bodies on the farm, and had obtained the search warrants that had led to the discovery of three more victims in Raymore. The Cass County DA and his people had shown up—after all the frustration and sweat and expense—and then reveled in the glory of the arrest and the attention of the media. There wouldn’t be any case in Harrisonville, the Johnson County DA’s office knew, if Morrison’s crew and the Kansas cops hadn’t done their job well. Because they had been diligent and successful, Robinson was locked up in one of their jails, and that was where they wanted him to stay. Until he’d been tried and convicted in Olathe, the state of Missouri and Cass County and Chris Koster could just wait.

It wasn’t long before the
Kansas City Star
jumped into this controversy and came down on Morrison’s side, while giving the younger DA a public spanking.

“Koster’s scheme,” the paper wrote, “to haul Robinson back and forth across the state line so Koster can score some prosecutorial points before Morrison should be halted in its tracks.”

In the end, Johnson County prevailed and Robinson stayed put in the Adult Detention Center. He would not be traveling anywhere for a long time, except to cross the street for his court appearances. His preliminary hearing was set for the fall of 2000, but it would be postponed for months. The Cass County DA could not have imagined how long he would have to wait.