Free Dead Men Talking by Christopher Berry-Dee

red tape inevitable in jurisdictional issues negotiated between two states. Early the next morning, as a result of his discussion, he and a group of detectives from Johnson County arrived at the office of Cass County’s Deputy Prosecutor, Mark Tracy. They carried with them the longest affidavit, in support of a search warrant, that Tracy had ever seen. It asserted that Robinson was believed to have killed several women and that it was suspected that evidence connected with the murders was hidden in the storage locker in Raymore; he had paid to rent his locker with a company cheque, in order to conceal his identity.
    We started removing boxes from the front [of Locker E2]. After less than 10 minutes there was a very foul odor that with my past experience I associated with a dead body.
    Douglas Borcherding, Overland PD officer.
    Shortly after 8am on the Monday, Mark Tracy served the search warrant on the storage depot and the Johnson County detectives were led to Robinson’s locker – effectively a small garage with a brown, lift-up shutter door. Inside was a lot of clutter and the task force spent more than half an hour sifting through it before they saw, hidden at the back, three barrels. Wafting from the barrels emanated the nauseating, unmistakable stench of decomposing flesh.
    As it was virtually certain that the barrels contained dead bodies, Tracy summoned his boss, Chris Koster, and the state of Missouri assumed immediate control of the crime scene. A new team of police investigators arrived and the locker was emptied of all its contents, save for the three barrels, which were standing on piles of cat litter; obviously a futile attempt by JR to reduce the smell coming from them.
    The first barrel, a black one with the words ‘rendered pork fat’ on the label, was opened by senior criminalist Kevin Winer. The contents revealed a body wrapped in blue-grey duct tape, and a light brown sheet. There was a pair of spectacles and a shoe. When the crime scene technician had removed the sheet, he took hold of the shoe, only to find that the foot was still attached to a leg. On the assumption that the storage depot wasn’t perhaps the best place to investigate the barrels and their contents, it was decided to reseal them and take them to the medical examiner’s office in Kansas City. However, this was not as simple a procedure as it seemed. There was a very real fear that the bottoms of the barrels were corroded and might give way, so a police officer was sent to a nearby Wal-Mart to buy three children’s plastic paddling pools and these were slipped underneath the barrels before they were loaded on to a truck.
    Back at the medical examiner’s office, the barrels were opened and, as expected, each contained a severely decomposed female body. Dr Thomas Young determined that they had all been beaten to death with a blunt instrument, probably a hammer, and had been dead for some six years. The body of Sheila Faith also had a fracture on her right forearm that was consistent with a defensive injury.
    The first body was fully clothed. The second was wearing only a T-shirt, and in its mouth was a denture which was broken in two. Body three was that of a teenager wearing green trousers and a silver-grey beret. Identification was not immediately possible and would take some days to complete.
    Over in Kansas, in Topeka, the two bodies found on the Robinson smallholding were identified by a forensic odontologist as those of Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten.
    A few days later, with the help of another forensic odontologist, two of the bodies that had been found at the storage depot were identified. One was Beverly Bonner; the other was Sheila Faith. Soon afterwards, Sheila’s disabled daughter, Debbie, was identified by means of a spinal X-ray, the technology of which, in past years, Robinson had been briefly acquainted with.
    The case against Robinson was beginning to assume a structure, although there was the problem of