True Crime Online

by HITCHCOCK J. A.

  Highly suspicious of Robinson, Suzette’s mother called the police to file a missing person’s report. When one of the officers recognized Robinson’s name from previous missing persons inquiries, the authorities stepped up their investigation, hoping for the break they needed to catch a serial killer.

  Unaware of the investigation, Robinson soon returned to his BDSM chat rooms. He even posed as Suzette when members expressed curiosity over her sudden disappearance. When some members began asking tough questions, Robinson stopped posing as Suzette, instead posting as the Slavemaster and another persona he called “JA Robinson.” Some of Suzette’s friends decided to check out the Slavemaster and took turns chatting with him. Once again, Robinson appeared to have his pick of willing slaves. He set his sights on Lore Remington, a young woman living in eastern Canada.

  Lore told Robinson she was very interested in becoming his slave. The chat room messages progressed to emails and then to phone calls. The Lenaxa, Kansas, police department had previously tapped Robinson’s phone as part of the ongoing investigation. Authorities took a gamble and contacted Lore to let her know about the investigation and asked if she would help with the case. She agreed.

  Although Lore tried to get Robinson to make overt promises or admit guilt about his past dealings with women, his responses remained guarded. As she recalled, he “offered nothing other than that I would be financially taken care of and never have to work.” Lore hedged, telling Robinson she didn’t seem to be his kind of slave. Neither would commit to taking the next step, so the relationship went no further.

  Robinson soon met a woman named Vickie Neufeld in one of the chat rooms he frequented. Vickie had just been laid off from her job and was depressed, making her a perfect target. Robinson’s many emails and phone calls convinced her that his many connections would help her find a good job. Of course, part of the deal was that she would become his slave. She didn’t want to move from Texas to Kansas City, but he offered to take care of all of her expenses and assured her that she could pay him back when she found a job. The police, who were monitoring Robinson’s calls by this time, were certain the Slavemaster was circling his next victim.

  Robinson wired money to Vickie, who came to Kansas City armed with more than $700 worth of sex toys and BDSM accessories. Robinson reserved a motel room and prepared for a night of rough sex with Vickie. As the police monitored the encounter from the next room, Vickie complained that Robinson’s demands as a master were too much for her. He didn’t like her attitude. He tied her up, beat her, and took photos of her in compromising positions. When the physical abuse finally ended, he left her tied up and alone in the motel room for a few days. The police did not intervene, just in case Robinson returned or if he was watching to see if she escaped. When Robinson did return, he told her to go back to Texas and wait for further orders. As his slave, she left obediently in keeping with his wishes, and he kept her collection of sex toys.

  This became a pattern that Robinson repeated with several women. He brought them to the same motel, had rough sex with them, assaulted them, took photos of the bruises and marks on their bodies, and then left them alone in the room for a few days to think about their roles as slaves. When he returned, he would send them home to await his further orders.

  A woman named Jeanna Milliron would turn out to be more resourceful than the rest. As usual, Robinson ordered her to come to Kansas City, and she followed his demands. He assaulted her and abandoned her in the motel, as he had done with the others, but Jeanna found a way to free herself from Robinson’s bondage and called the police.

  Now that a credible witness had come forward, county prosecutor Paul Morrison agreed to issue a warrant for Robinson’s arrest, but concerns remained. Issuing a warrant for sexual battery was one thing, but in order to prosecute Robinson for the unsolved murders, the prosecutor needed more evidence—ideally, another victim he could tie the Slavemaster to.

  New evidence was produced through the police phone tap on Robinson. He was communicating with a woman in Tennessee about her plans to move to Kansas City to become his latest slave; police were alarmed to discover that she planned to bring her 8-year-old daughter with her. Combing through the list of women Robinson was known to have brought to the motel, police located Vickie in Texas; they were able to convince her to file a complaint against Robinson for sexual battery and theft.

  In June 2000, authorities arrived at Robinson’s mobile home and arrested him. The police not only had search warrants for his mobile home but for a ranch he owned about 30 miles away. Robinson didn’t believe the police had any incriminating evidence against him, as he was unaware of the phone taps and ongoing surveillance.

  Robinson’s “ranch” was no more than an old, deserted mobile home and a dilapidated barn on the edge of a large pond overrun by tall grass. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation brought in cadaver-sniffing dogs and began to inspect every inch of the property.

  On one side of the barn, two 55-gallon yellow chemical drums were barely visible among the tall weeds. After darting around the barn briefly, the cadaver-sniffing dogs sat down in front of the drums and refused to move.

  “It was horrendous,” Sgt. Rick Roth testified at the trial, recalling that when they took the lid off the first drum, the smell of decaying flesh made investigators gag. Inside the drum was the body of a young woman partially submerged in fluid. The police didn’t bother opening the second drum; they already knew what it contained. Both drums were taken to the county morgue, where officials found the badly decomposed body of a second woman. The remains were eventually identified as those of Izabela and Suzette.

  Just over the state line in Missouri, police obtained a search warrant for the storage facility where Robinson had rented two units. They found three more chemical drums inside, all containing bodies in various stages of decomposition. One victim was identified as Beverly; the two others were women who had been reported missing after telling family and friends they were going to work for Robinson in Kansas City.

  Autopsies later revealed that all five women had died quickly from blunt-force trauma to the head. The report offered their families some relief; at least the women hadn’t suffered long. But authorities knew these were all premeditated killings.

  Police obtained a third search warrant to gain access to the apartment that Robinson had rented for Izabela. The landlord told authorities that while most of the apartment had been dusty and unkempt when Robinson left with Izabela’s furniture and belongings, the bedroom looked like it had been cleaned and repainted. Authorities sprayed Luminol—a blood-detecting chemical that glows under ultraviolet light—on the bedroom walls and floor and found traces of blood.

  Although police didn’t uncover any additional bodies at the time, incriminating evidence was found linking Robinson to two other missing women. The county prosecutor in Kansas City charged Robinson with theft and sexual battery against his motel victims as well as three counts of murder (of Suzette, Izabela, and Lisa Stasi, a third victim). Missouri prosecutors added three more capital murder charges to Robinson’s list of crimes. He was held on a $5 million bond in maximum security.

  Robinson’s Kansas trial took place in October 2002. His public defender, Byron Cerillo, chastised the media for sensationalizing the trial, saying, “I resent the fact that people are now claiming that Mr. Robinson, either directly or indirectly, is a serial killer.”

  Robinson’s family released a statement that read, in part, “As each day has passed, the surreal events have built into a narrative that is almost beyond comprehension. While we do not discount the information that has and continues to come to light, we do not know the person whom we have read and heard about on TV. The John Robinson we know has always been a loving and caring father.”

  During the trial, the evidence included the infamous 40-minute video of Robinson and Beverly having sadomasochistic sex in a motel room, which the jury was required to watch. Most of them covered their eyes during parts of the video.

>   Early in the video, Beverly said, “This is what you wanted me to tell you. I’m your slave … Everything is yours.”

  Robinson responded by telling her, “The most important thing in life is you are my slave.”

  More than 100 witnesses testified for the prosecution during the 3-week trial. The jury deliberated quickly, finding Robinson guilty on three counts of murder. In January 2003, judge John Anderson III sentenced Robinson to death for each count of murder, plus a life sentence.

  The state of Missouri also wanted to try Robinson for three murders, but the defendant knew Missouri judges were much more favorable to death penalty sentences than their Kansas counterparts and he fought to postpone extradition for the Missouri trial. After a seemingly endless round of negotiations between his lawyers and Missouri prosecutors, the parties agreed to accept guilty pleas for the murders in exchange for life without parole.

  Robinson’s wife Nancy filed for divorce in February 2005. But because there was no follow-through by either party, the divorce was never granted.

  In July 2009, Robinson appealed his conviction, claiming he had not received a fair trial. Paige Nichols, his attorney, said Nancy had been coerced into cooperating with officials by hinting that she had helped Robinson commit the murders.

  “That attitude pervaded this case, led to multiple illegal searches, and resulted in rushed pretrial proceedings and a patently unfair trial,” Nichols wrote in the appeal.

  Nichols also claimed that the judge who issued the search warrant leading to the discovery of Suzette’s and Izabela’s bodies did not have jurisdiction.

  That appeal was denied, and Robinson remains on death row at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.

  Suzette Trouten, murdered by serial killer John Robinson [Courtesy of Lenexa Police Department]

  Beverly Bonner, Robinson’s apparent first victim [Courtesy of Lenexa Police Department]

  Izabela Lewicka, a Polish student killed by Robinson [Courtesy of Lenexa Police Department]

  Robinson after many years spent in prison [Courtesy of Lenexa Police Department]

  Swedish Phishing

  “PLEASE leave me ALONE!” Angry, frustrated, and fearful, Melissa frantically typed the email message and hit the Send button.

  How much more could she take? The harassing emails from a man she had met only once had continued for 11 long years, and still there seemed to be no end in sight. When it started she was in high school; now she was married and pregnant with her second child. Given the most recent messages, she decided that her cyberstalker wasn’t just a harmless nut. He was going to do something crazy.

  It all began in 1999, when Melissa’s sister, Veronica, went out on a date with Martin Amsteus, a Swedish citizen who was visiting the U.S. The two dined at the restaurant where Melissa was working as a waitress at the time, and for reasons she cannot fathom to this day, Amsteus left the restaurant convinced that one of the sisters had fallen in love with him. From his home in Sweden, he began sending strange, unwanted email messages to Melissa. She cancelled her email account and signed up with a new service, but he soon tracked her down and resumed writing her.

  At times, there would be a lull in Amsteus’s email campaign, and Melissa would breathe a sigh of relief. But he would always reappear. On Valentine’s Day 2008, her sister-in-law Rikki received flowers at her home in North Carolina. Although Rikki first assumed they were from her husband, Marcus, the card was from a man she’d never met—Amsteus. In it, he begged her to send him contact information for Melissa and Veronica.

  Rikki ignored Amsteus, but he had discovered her email address and began writing her. Not wanting to alarm her husband or his sisters, Rikki kept Amsteus’s communications secret at first, but as the messages grew increasingly acrimonious, she confided to Marcus about the situation. He emailed Amsteus, asking him to leave his wife alone, at which point the sulking Swede began directing his tirades at Marcus.

  “He apparently had chatted with my sisters online over 10 years previously,” Marcus said. “At this time they must have been 17 or 18 years old. I knew nothing of it, but I’m sure they just decided to grow up like everyone else and cut off their ties to online chatting. Either that or this guy started really freaking them out so they banished him.”

  For 2 weeks, Marcus emailed Amsteus telling him he would not provide any information about his sisters. But Amsteus was desperate and determined to find out why Melissa and Veronica had stopped replying to his messages. He’d called Melissa at one point, Marcus learned, but she’d told him there was nothing between them and that he should stop contacting her.

  “Mind you, this was over 10 years ago, and apparently my sisters were still avoiding him,” Marcus said. “He kept wanting me to give him my dad’s email address ‘because he can solve this.’ I refused and told him nothing good could come of this. He was threatening to come over here, and I honestly was not sure if he was the most sane person.”

  By May 2008, Amsteus was sending more than a dozen emails a day to Marcus at his office at a North Carolina college. The messages were often shrill diatribes such as this one:

  And Marcus, what about that they would tell you who Veronica called that night, because you are Veronica’s brother and she would tell you—how come I still don’t KNOW, what kind if a sick game are you playing, why do you allow it to ruin somebody’s life.

  If you do not answer/give me David’s [the father’s] email address, I will write others at your school explaining this in detail and asking them to ask you. I have no other choice. I have to solve this. Believe me, I am not trying to be mean. How long have I waited to get this solved … how much time of my life have I lost, what are the alternatives, what options do I have, this will just continue otherwise. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know who I talked to. Melissa refuses to answer even what clearly pertains to her. I rest my case. Your choice, give me Davids email address, please, or have other people around you sent a detailed explaination of this and the request to ask you to give it to me.

  At other times, the emails arrived with only subject lines and no text in the body:

  Subject: I want to solve what happened that is All, is that strange or hard?

  Subject: You choose how long this will go on. It is THAT simple.

  Subject: If it bothers you that I write, I will go over there, will write physical letters, WHY not give me …

  That same month, Marcus sought help from WHOA, the online safety organization. WHOA sent official complaints to Amsteus’s ISP as well as to Yahoo! and Hotmail, where he had email accounts. Yahoo! quickly responded, saying that it had “taken appropriate action against the Yahoo! accounts in question, as per our Terms of Service (TOS),” but it would not disclose “the action taken on another user’s account with a third party.”

  Hotmail followed suit, but there was no response from Telia, Amsteus’s ISP in Sweden. For several weeks the emails stopped, but it would not be for long.

  On May 27, Rikki received a series of rambling messages from Amsteus, which she refused to answer. Telia had notified him about WHOA’s complaint, and he complained to Melissa:

  Look, this is most likely going to court now anyway, because Rikki sent a complain to that organization who contacted Telia who is my internet provider, and she obviously claimed that I was threatening her. This information Telia relayed to me, which means that I report them to datainspektionen, since they cannot, according to Swedish law keep that kind of information on me. Telia sent me a letter about this, and I have asked them to send me a copy on all information they have and letting then know that all of it goes to datainspektionen. Also, to claim that I threathened anybody is slander, which is a crime. All this will go, together with a description of this from the beginning to the end to that organisation too, I can’t remember the name of it. Get it? So I am going straight to Church street to hand this over in writing and then we can meet in court. I cannot be the only one trying. If you don’t want me to even try I wont, which me
ans I will hand this over everything, from the beginning, in writing to David instead, and then you may as well give me his [David’s] email address.”

  When Marcus learned that Amsteus was continuing to email Melissa, he asked her to forward everything to WHOA. He was growing more and more concerned about the bizarre messages the Swede was sending family members, including this one to Melissa:

  To say that I threathened her is low. I want to know how you think or feel about this, if you feel the same? Because then we are not at square 0 we are at square -1. Remember how I explained how you saing you hate me etc., made it worse to me in that it becomes more important to me to solve. That is what saying I threathened does. I have zero respect for that woman now, zero. Haven’t I tried to confide and explain everything about this to you

  Please let me know what you think. Can we please meet somewhere, just to meet up, it would be a huge step in solving this and in me getting over it, honestly Melissa, you know that, so can we? (please) Or should I go and try to talk to Veronica first?

  WHOA filed more complaints with Yahoo! and Telia. Yahoo! again quickly took action by canceling the accounts. On July 11, WHOA officials received a long-winded comment from Amsteus:

  With regard to your message to Telia, who is my internet provider, where you claim that I harass these people: This issue is now under criminal investigation. I am currently looking into the US laws on organizatons, such as yours, handling private email; over here, in Sweden, it is completely restricted by law, thus the investigation. I will also, in short, send you a full description of what this whole case is about, which includes multiple fraud. I will further provide you with evidence how this Markus says he could ask other people involved on a critical issue that would be step to completely solve this, because he is their brother, and they would listen to him, waving a carrot - but did not - when I it would take him 10 seconds and I have spent 10 years. My full description will make it obvious how your message to Telia is slander, which at least in this country is criminal.