Free Dead Men Talking by Christopher Berry-Dee Page B

because of the children. Although, at the penalty phase of the trial, JR’s family asked the court to spare his life, when the jury had reached a decision about his punishment the Robinson family put a lot of air under their car’s tyres and were nowhere to be seen.
    Nancy divorced her husband on 25 February 2005, and wants nothing more to do with him, further exposing Robinson as a pathological liar. In a letter to the author dated 10 January 2008, he writes: ‘My family worked for two years to put together a team which included every possible requirement from data-base set-up to forensic testing, most volunteers. Unfortunately the actual cost budget put together was $2.5 million dollars, an impossible amount.’
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    In January 2003, Judge John Anderson III sentenced Robinson to death twice and handed down a life sentence for the killing of Lisa Stasi.
    With John Robinson now on Death Row in Kansas, the state of Missouri were still pursuing the three murders that had been committed within their jurisdiction. For his part, JR was more worried about being extradited to stand trial in Missouri, because that state was much more aggressive in using capital punishment than Kansas. However, in point of fact, Kansas has not executed anyone since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, so JR’s fears were groundless.
    Despite Robinson’s argument that his attorneys were all but useless, they had negotiated tirelessly with Chris Koster, the Missouri prosecutor, who stood firm against their offers and tried to get Robinson to lead investigators to the bodies of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey and Catherine Clampitt.
    Either because he could not, or would not reveal where he had dumped the bodies, Robinson demurred until Koster and his team became convinced the women’s remains would never be found. Only then did Koster, with the permission of the victims’ families, agree to accept the guilty pleas in return for life without parole sentences. JR would never be executed in Missouri.
    In mid-October 2003, JR, looking much older than his 59 years, stood before a Missouri judge and, in a carefully scripted plea, acknowledged that the prosecutor had enough evidence to convict him of capital murder for the deaths of Godfrey, Clampitt, Bonner and the Faiths. He demanded the unusual plea agreement because an admission of guilt in Missouri might have been used against him in Kansas – Kansas prosecutor Paul Morrison said he wasn’t convinced the murders actually occurred in Koster’s jurisdiction – and nothing he said in Cass County, Missouri, resembled anything like a confession of guilt.
    This was classic John Robinson. The guy was a gamesman to the end.
    DA Paul Morrison, speaking to the Kansas City Star .
    Once again, JR gave no statement or even a hint of what prompted his homicidal acts. As the victims’ next of kin shared their feelings of anger and pain before his sentencing to life in prison in Missouri, he ignored them and stared straight ahead, oblivious to the hurt he had wrought. His mind unable to empathise with them, Robinson appeared bored with the entire process. In this, the final time he was ever likely to appear in public, it was clear that the depth of their emotions were something he had never experienced, and cared not a jot about.
    Amazingly, some good news followed: on 6 July 2000, authorities located Lisa Stasi’s daughter, Tiffany, alive and living with Robinson’s older brother, Don, in Hammond, Indiana. Unaware that the adoption was not legal or that the girl’s mother had disappeared and presumably been murdered by Robinson, whom the child knew as ‘Uncle John’, Don and his wife raised the little girl in a normal, loving fashion. At the time of writing, Tiffany is 23. She has been made aware of the true identity and fate of her mother and has since met her biological father.
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    The deal I offered JR was that he could write what he wanted to say in this chapter, in