by Tom Philbin
“One person will come up and think like this: ‘Hmm, that’s looks good. I’d love to take it. But it’s not mine, and taking it would be wrong.’ So that person leaves.
“Another person arrives and says: ‘Hmm, a hot apple pie. I’d love to take this, but if I do and I get caught, there will be consequences. Frig it. I don’t care!’ So he takes the pie and runs away.
“The third person comes up, sees the pie, and says to himself, ‘Hmm, a hot apple pie. I love that.’ So he takes it, no guilt, no nothing, and runs away.
“That,” the psychiatrist said, “is the sociopath.”
Of course, that is only part of the story. A sociopath like John Robinson cares only for himself, and can often suffer psychotic breaks and harbor a huge rage that every now and then explodes, and somebody ends up dead.
Frankly, Robinson—and people like him—are difficult to write about in an emotionally understanding way because I am neither a psychopath nor a sociopath. I care about others.
All-American Boy
Perhaps if those women had known a little about Robinson’s background, they would have run for the hills. His life started ordinarily enough. When he was young, John Robinson did not give any indication that anything inside himself was awry. He was born in Cicero, Illinois, a town about five miles from Chicago and the one-time gangland headquarters of Al Capone. Robinson’s mother was said to be a strict disciplinarian, and his father was not on the scene.
Rather than giving any hint of problems, Robinson seemed to be an all-American boy. He was an Eagle Scout and a musician who had performed before Queen Elizabeth II at a concert in London. He enrolled as a high-school freshman at Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago where he was preparing to become a priest. (One detective said of him later: “I wouldn’t want to go to confession if he was a priest. You’d never get out of the confessional alive.”)
But as he grew up, John Robinson’s troubles started to rear their head. In his freshman year at Quigley, he was a poor student and became a discipline problem. So much so, in fact, that school authorities did not allow him back for his sophomore year, ending his dreams of becoming a priest.
A Growing Problem
Many people who have an inferior sense of self—and serial killers all do—invent grandiose images of themselves that are figments of their own imaginations. Robinson had dreams of glory, dreams that he would one day be someone very important, and he seemingly tried to prove that to himself, regardless of the fact that his “achievements” were propped up by a pastiche of self-delusion and lies. In other words, he seems to have had the ability to convince himself that he was important. In 1977, for example, he was named “Man of the Year” by a Kansas City charity, an award that he orchestrated himself and which was a complete scam.
This proved to be a problem because he had conned the Kansas City Star into running a story on it. When people who supposedly had supported Robinson in his quest for the award started denying that they had, the Star ran an exposé on Robinson that showed him to be a fraud and thoroughly embarrassed him and his family. (He had married at twenty-one and immediately had a child.)
As Robinson matured, he got worse. He became a thief through and through. He felt no guilt when he ripped someone off, and he didn’t care who he conned. His scams as the years went by included conning an old friend out of $25,000, which was quite a bit of money at the time.
Later, he took a job as a radiologist in Kansas City while knowing nothing about the profession. That, of course, was extremely dangerous for the patients. Eventually, his incompetence was discovered and he was fired.
After that, he started working as a radiologist for Wallace Graham, MD, President Harry Truman’s long-time friend and former personal physician. Robinson began stealing from Graham and taking shocking sexual liberties in the office. He convinced one of the patients to have sex by telling her that his wife had terminal cancer and couldn’t have sex with him.
Robinson depleted the doctor’s finances to the point that he wasn’t able to give his employees a bonus for Christmas. Finally in 1969, the laid-back, low-key, and trusting doctor had his practice audited and discovered that Robinson had bilked him out of $33,000. Ever the consummate actor, Robinson got probation during which he perpetrated other offenses.
Opportunities in Cyber-Crime
All of that stealing no doubt honed his skills as a con man, and when the Internet came into bloom in 1995, Robinson came into his own as a criminal. He became a poster child for the kind of person that no one should contact on the Internet, although he did not present himself as something that he was not, at least sexually. He was looking for a certain kind of woman. Billing himself as the Slavemaster, he started to connect with women who were into S and M, and willing to become his slaves.
John Robinson, slavemaster and serial killer.
The difference between Robinson and other sadists was that he delivered real pain to the women who met with him, not just what could be called play pain. I believe that ultimately, anyone who is into S and M wants to be loved and taken care of like a child, and while some of his women may have recognized how cruel and uncaring Robinson was, they continued to see him. Certainly, they did not stay hooked up with him because he was a matinee idol. Indeed, he was paunchy and unremarkable looking. Some of the women were not into S and M, but Robinson was also a superb con man and willing to say anything to achieve his ends.
Eventually, cops in both Kansas and Missouri started to connect the female disappearances to one person—John Robinson. They knew about a variety of missing women, all with some type of relationship to Robinson.
In 1984, Robinson was in communication with 18-year-old Paula Godfrey of Olathe, Kansas. He talked her into taking a job with him, working in some capacity at one of his nonexistent companies where he promised her the moon. Godfrey told her parents that Robinson was sending her away for training, but when they did not hear anything from her, they filed a missing person’s report.
Eventually, her parents received a typed note—above her signature—that said she was okay. She supposedly also sent a note to the Overland Park police, stating that she was fine and didn’t want to be contacted by them or her parents. Since she was eighteen, the police could do nothing further. They dropped the case, and Paula Godfrey remained missing.
Robinson’s inflated ego is interesting to observe in operation. He assumed that if he sent the note, the cops wouldn’t become suspicious. That was a truly dumb assumption, and only people with delusions of grandeur would think they could get away with something like that.
Baby for Sale
In 1985, Lisa Stasi, a 19-year-old single mother, met a man calling himself “John Osborne” at a shelter. The man promised her an apartment, job training, a monthly stipend, and even day care for her four-month-old daughter, Tiffany. Stasi agreed, signed a few blank sheets of paper, and promptly disappeared.
A few days after meeting Stasi, Robinson contacted his brother Don and his wife, Helen, and informed them that he had a four-month-old baby girl that they could adopt. He told them that, tragically, the baby’s mother had committed suicide in a hotel room, but his connections with a local charity would allow him to get the child for them if they paid the legal fees, which would be around $8,000 when the baby was delivered. The baby, of course, was Tiffany Stasi, and the papers Robinson brought were all forgeries.
Lisa Stasi
Buoyed by his ability to con people in this way, Robinson subsequently tried to con other young women who had children. He approached a number of homes that housed indigent mothers and tried to convince the people in charge that he was willing to take on the mothers and children, but without the proper official paperwork he got nowhere fast.
In 1987, 27-year-old Catherine Clampitt, moved from Texas to Kansas to work with Robinson, but like others, she disappeared.
In 1993, Robinson was released from a stint in jail where he had met 49-year-old Beverly Bonner. She was a librarian in the correc
tions system, and he had actually seduced her there. As soon as he got out of prison, Bonner divorced her husband, a prison doctor, and hooked up with Robinson. He killed Bonner shortly after she had all of her alimony checks forwarded to a post-office box. What had happened to her would only be revealed later by the mystified police.
Of all the murders that cops eventually uncovered, the worst by far, at least in the opinion of the author, was that of Sheila Faith and her daughter.
In 1994, Robinson met the 45-year-old from Fullerton, California, who was looking for a man after her husband died. Sheila’s 15-year-old daughter, Debbie, used a wheelchair, was in need of constant medical care, and had hardly enough strength to move the wheelchair on her own. Robinson met Sheila in an online chat room and promised to provide care for both her and 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 not technically airtight. (Among other problems, no unequivocal evidence showed that any of the murders had actually occurred in Koster’s jurisdiction.)
As of now, Robinson is on Death Row in Kansas, and if a lot of people have their way, he will be the first person to die in that state via lethal injection.
Who Am I?
Like John Robinson, I was a con man and a killer, and when I moved to the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago in the late 1890s, pretty young women who came to the area started to go missing.
I was well aware that many of those pretty young women wanted to work at the Chicago World’s Fair, which was opening in the fall of 1892, and businesses related to it.
I had arrived in Chicago a few years earlier, and the first thing I did was to start working for a pharmacy in Englewood. The lady I worked for was very grateful because her husband, who had founded and operated the store, was dying of cancer, and when I started to work there, her dreams came true: I handled just about everything and did so well.
I attracted a lot of new customers to the store, particularly young, pretty women because I was attractive. I was a slim man, perhaps five-foot-eight, with a handsome face and big, liquid blue eyes that few women could look into without getting a strange sensation in their stomach.
I could cry at will. I had tears in my eyes when, after her husband died, I asked the lady to sell the pharmacy to me. She did, and I repaid her by never paying her for the store, making her life miserable, and murdering her, while telling everyone that she had left Illinois for California and would not be returning.
I was very good at bilking insurance companies, for example, by stealing a body from a medical lab and then convincing the company that it was someone I had bought insurance for.
If I couldn’t get the right body, I would murder someone and then alter their appearance by burning or cutting their features so they could pass as the deceased.
I also engaged in selling “articulated” bodies, skeletonized bodies, to medical laboratories. One person I murdered—who happened to be pregnant at the time with my baby—was a beautiful, six-foot-tall woman named Julia Connor. I got $225 (extra because she was unusually tall) for her body.
My home was my castle—and my slaughterhouse. It was a sixty-room hotel I designed, and no one else ever saw the plans. It debuted as a hotel for the World’s Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair) in 1893, with some of the building rented out for commerce. The hotel contained all kinds of special rooms where people were gassed, cremated while alive, asphyxiated, and stretched to the breaking point. I could drop the bodies down a chute that led to a room where the bodies were eventually sold to medical schools.
Police got on to me because of a fake life-insurance scheme involving a man named Benjamin Pitezel who was going to fake his own death, but I murdered him first.
I was arrested in 1894. Police investigated the castle, and eventually the whole story came out. The authorities pinned twenty-seven murders on me though most people thought that actual number came to more than one hundred.
Shortly before being hanged, I penned my account of those murders, for which I was paid $7,500. The story was published in the Philadelphia Enquirer on April 12, 1896. I was hanged on May 7, 1896. I was thirty-five years old.
Answer: I am Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer.
Dr. H.H. Holmes, born Herman Webster Mudgett, was a serial killer who preyed on young women and killed
more than 100 people.
Notable Quotable
“In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story. My life has been straightened out…Wait ’til you hear the story of what took place at this house. You’re going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around.”
—Phillip Garrido, from his jail cell
Although children are not abducted often—the FBI estimates about 100 each year in the United States—the statistics on how many of those children survive are quite grim. Still, most people don’t give up hope, and sometimes there is the rare occasion when an abducted child is found alive.
That happened in the case of Jaycee Lee Dugard. When Jaycee was abducted, she was eleven years old and living in South Lake Tahoe, California, where she was waiting patiently at a bus stop. A pretty, blonde-haired girl dressed all in pink, she was being watched carefully by her stepfather, Carl Probyn, as she waited for the bus.
Then, suddenly, Probyn couldn’t believe his eyes. As he watched, a gray car swooped up, and a man and a woman jumped out of the car and grabbed Jaycee. Probyn pursued them immediately on his bicycle, but they soon were out of sight. And despite Probyn having given the police a clear description of the car and the people who had abducted Jaycee, they got away. The usual intensive search was conducted without any luck. The Probyns’ pretty little daughter had been abducted.
Jaycee Lee Dugard. Abducted when she was 11 and found 18 years later.
