Anyone You Want Me to Be (31 page)

Clasping her hands in front of her as though she were starting to pray, the petite brunette looked up at the heavens and in her best Midwestern twang said, “Sweet Jesus, forgive me!”

The whole courtroom erupted into laughter and even the defendant got a chuckle.

Then Retia cut loose with the F-word.

All levity ended when the prosecutors introduced pictures and videos of Suzette and Izabela being removed from the barrels found on Robinson’s farm, as well as some autopsy photos. Once again, these images were strongly challenged by the defense team. Not only did they find them highly prejudicial, they did not want the jurors to have the option of revisiting them during their upcoming deliberations. Morrison countered this argument by simply saying, “Judge, as grisly as this may seem, this case is about dead women in barrels.” Judge Anderson concurred and allowed in some of the images, as well as others of Lewicka lying nude on green-and-maroon-patterned sheets in an apartment Robinson had rented for her.

The trial had already featured several disturbing moments, but nothing could quite match what the jurors were about to see. In the color video, it was jarring enough to watch the lids being removed from the barrels, but then came a direct view of the purplish, decomposing bodies. It was now clear why the lawyers, during the drawn out jury selection, had gone to such lengths to make sure that the people they picked had strong constitutions. Being on any jury is hard work; being on this one could have brought on recurring nightmares.

The autopsy photos were even more unsettling. The courtroom was dark and absolutely silent as still photos were shown of the two women after they’d been removed from the barrels and laid out on plastic sheets. Their bodies were yellowish and shapeless, their faces featureless, and they looked more like alien life-forms than human beings. A close-up showed Suzette’s head partially covered by a blindfold, and other photos showed both women’s peeled-back scalps, revealing the fatal wounds. The pictures reinforced the true brutality of how they’d died and the force needed to inflict such damage. During the display of the video and the photos, Robinson had no reaction at all. He too seemed totally numb.

The various images of Suzette presented to the jury were the most haunting of all. The juxtaposition of her nude body and lively, gregarious personality—as seen on the porn video—and her dead, shrunken figure lying on the plastic sheeting was alarming. The life force that had been so present in her one instant and gone forever the next conjured up the value and the fragility of every human being. In both the video and the autopsy photos, she was wearing the same nipple rings connected by the same butterfly pendant. Her life and her death could be felt by anyone witnessing these images. The prosecution had five other murder victims to focus on, but they built the bulk of their case around Suzette. Her story was more recent than any of the other victims’, and it was perhaps more poignant. In twenty-seven years, the one and only time she had left her mother and her home to wander out into the world on her own, she never came back.

Studying her pictures, the jury looked pale and grim.

M
orrison’s next legal maneuver was to roll the eighty-five-gallon yellow barrels into the courtroom on metal pallets and position them a few feet away from the defendant. This strategy was effective because the barrels stood in such sharp contrast to the subdued mauve colors of the courtroom and the dark suits of the lawyers. You could not stop looking at them, and the DA would leave them there for part of the duration of his case. In private, the two-hundred-pound Morrison had climbed into one of the barrels and had a female assistant roll him around in order to prove that a single individual could move a full barrel. Something about the yellow barrels standing naked in open court hour after hour could not be forgotten. They made a fantastic story extremely real.

Day after day, Morrison brought in a parade of criminologists and other expert witnesses to testify about the evidence recovered from Robinson’s home, his farm, and his storage lockers. They’d found his DNA on many of the pastel envelopes that had been sealed and mailed out to various relatives of the dead. They’d counted up the amount of money he’d taken from several of the victims over the years: he’d cashed alimony checks from Beverly Bonner worth about $14,000 and Social Security checks from Sheila and Debbie Faith worth about $80,000. The experts talked about how Izabela’s blood had been found on duct tape at the farm and on the walls of the apartment she’d occupied at Edgebrook. Suzette’s blood was positively identified on the wallboard in the farm trailer. Traces of violence had been left behind at each of the locations and were now presented to the jury.

After offering nearly three weeks of testimony, the state rested. For the past few days, the courtroom had been abuzz with what to expect from the defense. Would they bring Robinson’s children or at least his most loyal daughter, Christy, to the stand and have her talk about her father’s goodness? Would they bring Nancy back to bolster what she’d already said about her husband? Would Dr. Dorothy Lewis, the Yale psychiatrist who’d examined Robinson in September, be sworn in and speak to the jurors about child abuse in the defendant’s background and how this had led to mental illness? Or would Robinson’s lawyers save some of these witnesses in case their client was convicted on the capital charges and needed them to testify in the death-penalty phase of the trial? Would they then be used to ask the jury to spare his life?

In the end, the defense put up less of a fight than many people had expected, and after presenting only three insignificant witnesses, they abruptly rested. Maybe they’d decided to save their energy for the appeals process that would automatically follow a death-penalty conviction. Or maybe they’d felt, as they’d been saying for months, that they simply hadn’t had time to prepare for a trial this massive or to examine the mental health of their client in depth. Near the end of presenting his case, O’Brien again sounded this theme.

“We haven’t had adequate opportunity,” the lawyer told the judge, “to develop these issues.”

Then O’Brien added, “The jury will know nothing about how crazy this man is. He has been on suicide watch since the beginning of the trial.”

Once more Judge Anderson held firm, saying that Robinson had had plenty of time to get ready for trial. It had been his decision to change lawyers twice since his arrest, and he was the one responsible for all the delays.

Hearing this, O’Brien sat down and looked genuinely distraught. Like Berrigan and the other defense attorneys, he’d conducted himself well in tough circumstances throughout the long trial. He’d gently tried to raise doubts in the jurors’ minds and introduced them to the S&M subculture with sensitivity and discretion. He’d been polite, soft-spoken, and thoughtful with all the witnesses, even when they were severely damaging his case. He’d consistently acted as if he cared not only for the defendant’s family members, but for the defendant himself. On one occasion at the defense table, when Robinson’s suit collar had been ruffled, O’Brien leaned over and straightened it out, patting his client on the back.

It was standing room only in the courtroom for the closing arguments, and some people had to be turned away at the door. The gallery was jammed with journalists, spectators, Johnson County courthouse employees, law enforcement personnel, plus relatives of the victims and the man on trial. The barrels had been brought back into court and put up front, by the judge, where everyone could see them.

Morrison began by saying that it was hard to come up with terms to describe a man like John Robinson, but one that did fit him was “sinister.”

“Sinister,” the DA said, moving toward the big yellow barrels, “in that he’s JR, J. Osbourne, or others, always luring vulnerable people. Sinister, in that we’ve got rotting bodies in the barrels.”

As he said this last word, Morrison reached over and lightly tapped the lid of one barrel. The hollow sound echoed throughout the room and hung eerily in the air.

“Sinister,” he went on, “in that he took a baby from her mother, and sinister in that Sheila and Debbie Faith, in her wheelchair, were murdered and put into barrels. You wonder, did Debbie watch her mother get murdered?”

As he spoke, Carol Trouten, her ex-husband, Harry, and their daughter Dawn sat behind the prosecution table. On the other side of the gallery, Nancy Robinson’s two daughters, Christy and Kim, sat on either side of her. They stared straight ahead and Christy kept her arm around her mother.

Morrison began talking about Suzette and how in her diary she’d mentioned a fantasy of being blindfolded and serving her master.

“She’s a master’s dream,” the DA said. “You saw the tape…. If you want to put that tape in—it’s in evidence—close your eyes and just listen [to Robinson say], ‘Who owns you, bitch? Who owns you? You give your life to your master,’ as she sucks his penis. She was valueless to him.”

Nancy listened and did not flinch. Christy gave her mother a hug.

“Suzette wanted a twenty-four/seven master-slave relationship,” Morrison said, “but it’s hard to do that and to pretend to be a husband and grandfather. So what did he do? Killed her and put her in a barrel.”

The DA tapped the lid again and let the empty sound echo around the room. “Like a piece of valueless trash.”

The Trouten family absorbed the words and looked on the verge of tears.

Robinson, Morrison continued, had not only made a phone call from his farm at 11:43
A
.
M
. on March 1, 2000, but that call had been to his wife. This remark was personal and directed right at Nancy: the DA had not forgiven what she’d said during her testimony.

Morrison shifted away from Suzette and said that Izabela Lewicka had been killed after Robinson had taken up with his new girlfriend, Barbara Sandre.

“Lewicka died,” the prosecutor said, “so his new girlfriend could have new furniture. This is a guy who puts his signature on one of his victim’s paintings. She was in a barrel for about nine months.” He tapped the lid again and let it echo.

“We’ll prove this case not only beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond any doubt.”

Sitting in the gallery this morning was a woman who’d dated Robinson a few years earlier. She had the same name as a famous person and claimed to be writing a book about the defendant. His lawyers had wanted to keep her out of the courtroom, but eventually she’d gotten in. She was heavyset and had a reddish tint to her hair. She was friendly and periodically spoke to the reporters present, saying that Robinson had been a lot of fun to go out with because he gave you so much attention.

“He gave you all the attention you wanted,” she said.

When they were dating, she’d believed that he was not married because he carried with him divorce papers to prove that he was single. She’d wanted to pursue their relationship, but after a while she’d realized that he was lying to her about a number of things, and the lying had driven her away. She now sat in court each day and stared at the back of Robinson’s balding head, studying him and taking a lot of notes. She wore an expression of deep curiosity, as if she’d seen or learned something from him that she didn’t really want to know about people. Once, when she was asked if she’d ever considered Robinson insane, she instantly replied, “No. Not insane, but evil. The lies were evil.”

One early evening after the trial had recessed and the sun was going down, she left the courthouse wrapped tightly in her overcoat, leaning into the cold wind, her reddish hair blowing as she made her way steadily up the sidewalk. Her refusal to swallow the lies may have been the only thing that had kept her from being interred in a barrel.

Sean O’Brien made the closing statement for the defense, and his argument was as probing and gentle and intelligent as everything else he’d done in the courtroom. He tried to undermine the prosecution’s notion that all the crimes in this case were connected by a common scheme or course of conduct, pointing out that they had occurred over many years and in very different circumstances. He said that a lot of unanswered questions remained about the evidence, and that other people may have been involved in the murders, and not all of the killings were premeditated, and for these reasons the crimes were not necessarily connected to one another.

“If there is reason to doubt this,” he said, “you must find the defendant is not guilty of capital murder. If even one of you has a reasonable doubt that this is capital murder, then you go to first-degree murder…. If you find him guilty of first-degree murder, the sentence goes to the judge and you all go home.”

He seemed to be asking less for an acquittal than for mercy from the jurors, and for them not to execute the defendant. And as he continued to speak, he revealed just how educational defending John Robinson had been for him and how much he’d learned about the Internet changing people’s lives. This veteran defense lawyer had never seen anything quite like this trial before, and O’Brien, more than anyone else in the courtroom, gave voice to the thoughts that had permeated the entire proceeding.

“One obstacle in this case that makes it difficult for us,” he told the jury, “is that it’s rooted very deeply in fantasy. I didn’t know that this existed in the world until I was appointed to this case. We’ve all stepped through the looking glass together….

“Common sense is only of limited value in this case. Common sense never told me that men and women surf the Internet looking for these relationships…and that people go to distant cities to have sex with people they only met on the Internet. Common sense never told me that people derive sexual pleasure from pain. Or that people like John Robinson and Lore Remington have BDSM relationships by day and go home to families at night….

“Is there any doubt in our mind that we are talking about damaged people? What happens that brings people together in these activities? Dr. Neufeld might try to convince you that this is a perfectly normal thing between consenting adults. There are people in the world who need the fantasy to make sense of what’s in their lives.”

Then he quoted perhaps the most famous words ever written by Henry David Thoreau—“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The comment was oddly appropriate because the case had been filled with average people hunting for a little something extra from life, something that took them away from their isolation or desperation and gave them a certain hope. They’d wanted to be attached to something larger than themselves, and the Net had been the doorway.

Near the end of his speech, O’Brien reiterated things that had come up before—that no hair or DNA of Robinson’s had been found on the barrels and that a palm print on the plastic covering one of the barrels remained unidentified. He suggested that in the future some of these lingering questions might be answered and it would make the jurors “look at this case in a different light…. How much kinder will you be to yourself if you make a mistake and err on the side of the angels? It would be easy in a case like this to take something other than the high road. We ask only for a verdict that is just and true.”

Morrison got to speak last and he quickly attacked O’Brien’s use of the Thoreau quotation.

“These lofty words,” he said, “don’t have much to do with extramarital affairs, BDSM, torture, and death, do they?”

Then he tapped the barrel a fourth time and let the hollow sound echo again.

“There is
no evidence,
” he said, “that anyone else had anything to do with these women in their last days.”

The force of this last sentence had caused his face to darken.

The one common thread in all these crimes, he told the jury, was John Robinson and that all of the women had come to him looking for something more, whether it was travel, money, a job, or a relationship. The only thing that evolved over time was the nature of his sexual involvement with some of them and the technology he used to lure them to Kansas City.