Free The Killer Book of Cold Cases by Tom Philbin

her daughter. The Faiths were charmed and moved to Kansas. Sheila received checks from her husband’s pension following his death, and Robinson arranged to have the checks routed to a post-office box. After that, Sheila and Debbie disappeared. Robinson continued to cash the pension checks, though.
    In 1999, Robinson offered attractive 21-year-old Izabela Lewicka a job and a bondage relationship. Soon after she moved to Kansas, records show that Robinson paid for a ring and a marriage license that was never picked up. Lewicka emailed family and friends to tell of her marriage, but a few months later she told friends she was going on a trip, and she was not heard from again.
Fatal Mistake
    Like other serial killers, John Robinson would have continued to kill if he not made a mistake that proved to the beginning of the end for him. It started when he met healthcare worker Suzette Trouten through the Internet. Robinson told her he wanted to hire her to take care of his elderly father. If she took the job, he told her, he would pay her $60,000 a year and she would get to travel the world with him and his father.
    Trouten was just the kind of woman that Robinson was looking for. A nurse by day, she was an abject slave by night, which included having rings in her nipples and vaginal area. She decided to come and meet “JR,” as he called himself then, and then work for him.
    In February she left Michigan for Kansas, but before she departed, she left Robinson’s name and number with her mother, Carolyn. Suzette’s mother spoke with her virtually every day by phone, so when she didn’t hear from her daughter, Carolyn reported her missing. Carolyn had become suspicious because typed letters she received, supposedly from Suzette and JR as they traveled Europe, had a Kansas City postmark and were uncharacteristically error free.
    Once the police heard about Suzette’s connection to Robinson—who they, of course, had linked to other disappearances and who was at the center of so many missing-persons cases, they decided to pay him a visit. That was in the summer of 2000.
    Once they did, the mysteries of a number of the missing women were solved. On Robinson’s farm near La Cygne, Kansas, a task force searching the premises found the decaying bodies of Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten, each in an 85-pound chemical drum. Across the state line in Missouri, other members of the task force searched a storage facility that Robinson had rented and found three similar chemical drums containing the bodies of Beverly Bonner and Sheila and Debbie Faith. All five women, both at the farm and in the storage area, had been murdered in the same way—by one or two blows to the head.
    In 2002, Robinson was tried for the murders of Trouten, Lewicka, and the Faiths at the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe, Kansas. He was convicted and sentenced to death. In 2005, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled the capital punishment laws in Kansas unconstitutional. However, in
Kansas v. Marsh
, a 2006 case before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court found otherwise, and the Kansas death-penalty law was reinstated.
Legal Dilemma
    Robinson simultaneously faced a complex legal dilemma in Missouri, where prosecutors were actively pursuing additional murder charges based on the evidence discovered in that state. Robinson’s attorneys opposed his extradition because Missouri is far more aggressive on capital punishment than Kansas, which had yet to execute anyone since the death penalty was reinstated. However, Christopher Koster, the Missouri prosecutor, insisted as a condition of any plea bargain that Robinson lead authorities to the bodies of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine Clampitt.
    Robinson was in a dilemma. To do so would constitute an outright admission of guilt, which might be used against him in Kansas. Robinson refused, claiming he did not know the locations of the bodies. Koster, on the other hand, faced pressure to make a deal because his case was