The Serial Killer Known as the Internet Slavemaster
John Edward Robinson was born on December 27th, 1943 in Cicero, Illinois. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother a disciplinarian.
In 2003 he was convicted of murdering three women, and he later admitted to five additional murders. After 1993, he trolled social networking sites using the name "Slavemaster" looking for women who enjoyed playing submissive in S&M roles.
Robinson’s beginning were ordinary. He was the middle children; the third of five siblings. When he was 14 years old he became an Eagle Scout, and knowing what steps he followed in adulthood, perhaps when he joined the Quigley Preparatory Seminary later that year, he was trying to tame the demons in his soul. The Chicago school with a curriculum tailored to aspiring priests didn’t suit him, and he left a year later due to disciplinary problems.
Morton Junior College where he sought an education as an x-ray technician also fell short of his aspirations, and he’d left by the time he was 20 years old.
The next few years were fruitful ones for John Robinson. In 1964, he moved to Kansas City and married Nancy Jo Lynch. A year later they had a son, John Jr. and and in 1971, twins Christopher and Christine were born. Eventually the couple had four children. But despite the appearance of normalcy, he had already run afoul of the law. In 1969, he was arrested for embezzling $33,000 from his employer. As a result he was sentenced to serve three years probation. He had gained the position as an x-ray tech using false credentials with Dr. Wallace Graham.
Robinson violated probation in 1970 when he left to Chicago without notifying his probation officer. R.B. Jones Company hired him as an insurance salesman, and by the next year he was arrested for embezzling from the company. He was sent back to Kansas City to finish his probation for the original crime, and for the additional charges.
Considering that probation did not prove a deterrent it’s not clear why his sentence was extended in 1975, after another arrest. This time it was on charges of securities fraud and mail fraud. He had established his own company and was supplying false “medical consulting”.
For those with deviant proclivities, they learn that living life with all the trappings of normalcy will open doors for them. Robinson appeared to be a family man, who gave of his time to be a scoutmaster, baseball coach and Sunday school teacher.
He even conned a position onto the board of directors of a charitable organization using forged letters that appeared to be from the Kansas City mayor’s office. The letters commended his sterling character, and once he had his foot in the door he got himself named “Man of the Year”.
Just in time for the end of his probation in 1979, he was arrested in 1980 for embezzlement and forging checks. He convinced a friend to invest $25,000 for a phony hydroponics business, with the promise of a fast return. The man needed the money to pay for his wife’s health care. For once he was given jail time, and he served 60 days in in 1982.
Around the same time, Robinson went for broke when he started to proposition his neighbor’s wives. And since this ended up being too tame for him, even after a fist fight with an angry husband, he joined the International Council of Masters. It was a sadomasochism cult he was tasked with luring victims to their meetings, ,where they would be tortured and raped by cult members.
Robinson had never lost the taste for fraud. In 1984, he started two shell companies (Equi-Plus and Equi-2), and hired Paula Godfrey, 19 as a sales representative. She told her family arrangements had been made for her and a group of women to fly to San Antonio, Texas to enroll in a clerical skills course. When she failed to return, her father traveled to San Antonio and discovered she had never checked into the hotel. He returned to Kansas City and confronted Robinson, demanding he tell their daughter she had to contact her family within 72 hours. They subsequently filed a missing person’s report.
Police of course came to speak to Robinson, since her family reported that he picked her up at their home on September 1, 1984, saying he was driving her to the airport. He told them he didn’t know anything of her whereabouts. A few days later Godfrey’s family received a typewritten letter signed by her, stating she was okay, that she wanted to start over, and she just didn’t want to see her family. Despite suspicions the letter was not authentic since it had several grammatical errors, Godfrey was an adult and there was no evidence of a crime. Police closed the case. Paula’s corpse has never been found.
Robinson met Lisa Stasi and her 4-month old daughter, Tiffany in 1985. He used the name of John Osborne when they crossed paths at a battered woman’s shelter in Kansas City. He promised her everything a desperate woman could wish for: a job, an apartment and daycare for her daughter. All he asked in exchange, was for her to sign several sheet of blank papers.
A few days later he asked his brother and his wife for $5,500. He told them this was the fee an imaginary lawyer would charge for the adoption of a baby, whose mother had committed suicide. For a couple who had not been able to adopt through traditional methods, Robinson’s offer was a Godsend. Besides the baby they got forged, but realistic looking adoption papers signed by a judge and two lawyers. The baby in question was Tiffany Stasi, who identity was confirmed in 2000 via DNA. Like Paula Godfrey, Lisa Stasi seemed to have been swallowed by the earth until today.
Robinson developed his M.O. which had proved to be successful so far. In 1987, he hired Catherine Clampitt, 27, with a job offer that seemed too good to be true. It came with the perks of a new wardrobe and travel. For a young mother who had left her child with her parents in Wichita Falls, Texas, it was easy to overlook perhaps warning signs that this man was not what he pretended to be. She disappeared in June, and her missing person’s report is still open.
The murders stopped when Robinson was behind bars from 1987 to 1991 in Kansas and Missouri on fraud convictions and parole violations.
The next to fall for Robinson’s fatal charm was Beverly Bonner, 49, the librarian at Western Missouri Correction Facility where he was doing time from 1992 to 1993. Upon his release, Beverly left her husband, moved to Kansas and became his employee. He arranged for her alimony checks to be sent to a post office box, and like Godfrey and Stasi, her family never heard anymore from her.
Little did Beverly’s mother know that the person cashing the checks she forwarded to her daughter was Robinson.
In the meantime, Robinson had found a new hunting ground known as the Internet. He took the name of “Slavemaster” at different social networks that brought in those curious or active in the S&M scene, especially women who enjoyed playing the submissive role in sex.
Sheila Howell married John Darwin Faith in 1977. He was seventeen years older than her, and the following year they had their one child, Debbie. The girl was born with spina bifida and was confined to a wheelchair. John Darwin passed away in 1991, and Sheila met Robinson in 1994.
Again the promise of a job from a supposedly wealthy man, who agreed to pay for her 15-year-old daughter’s therapy proved irresistible. In 1994, she moved from Fullerton, California to Kansas City and promptly disappeared.
For the next 7 years, Robinson cashed Sheila Faith’s pension checks.
In the meantime, Robinson grew in popularity in the BDSM chat rooms. Enter his next victim named Izabela Lewicka who was a sophomore at Purdue University. She was a 21-year-old Polish immigrant living in Indiana, who started her relationship with Robinson in a bondage chatroom. He offered her a job, a bondage relationship and a promise of marriage. The still-married Robinson gave her a ring, and applied for a marriage license that was never picked up. Izabela told her parents she was married, but didn’t give them her husband’s name.
Prior to her disappearance in the summer of 1999, she signed a 115-page slave contract giving Robinson total control over her life, including her finances. He told another one of his employees that Lewicka got arrested for smoking pot, and was deported as a way to explain her absence.
Lewicka was not even cold in her grave, when he courted Suzette Trouten, a practical nurse who led a double life as a submissive slave. She moved from Michigan to Kansas so they could travel the world together. The only traveling she did was to a grave. He had also promised her a $60,000 job taking care of his elderly father. Her mother received typewritten letters, allegedly from her daughter while she visited different countries, even though the letters were postmarked from Kansas City. And unlike Godfrey’s letter, her mother thought it was strange the ones she received had no mistakes. When Robinson figured he had to let go of the travel story, he told her mother she had run off with one of his friends, after stealing money from him.
However Robinson’s luck started to run out, plus he also became careless. Law enforcement in Missouri and Kansas came across his name in more than one missing person’s report.
In 2000, two women filed complaints against him, one for sexual battery and the other for stealing her sex toys. He was arrested in June at his 17-acre farm near La Cygne, Kansas. Adjacent to a shed, police found two women stuffed each inside 85-pound chemical drums. They were Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten.
Missouri police headed to search two storage units Robinson rented. Inside they found three chemical drums that contained the remains of Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith and Debbie Faith.
All the women had been killed by two blows to the head.
During the investigation in 2000, authorities reached out to Monroe County, Florida where Robinson once owned property. Robinson and his wife Nancy owned property in Big Pine Key from December 1995 to January 1999. The suspicion was that cold cases were the handiwork of Robinson. In 2006, the remains of a woman were discovered, close to where Robinson’s one-time partner lived. Again authorities wondered if she was an unknown victim.
Upon the arrest of her supposed uncle, Heather Robinson, then 16 years old learned she was Lisa Stasi’s daughter, and she had been illegally adopted by the Robinsons. It was believed neither knew the circumstances of how their daughter had been procured. She continued to live with the Robinsons, and they legally adopted her when she turned 18.
John Robinson was convicted and sentenced to death in Kansas in 2002 for the murder of Trouten and Lewicka. For Stasi he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 2002, the notorious “slavemaster” was a grandfather. His wife testified that he was a caring husband. It wasn’t only his wife, but his children who stood by his side during the lengthy trial.
Missouri prosecutors were looking to charge him with murder based on the evidence they had found in their jurisdiction. They state insisted that as a condition of any plea bargain he had to lead authorities to the bodies of Godfrey, Stasi and Clampitt. Acceptance of these terms would have constituted admission of guilt, which could be used against him in Kansas. He said no, and since Missouri was more aggressive in enforcing capital punishment, Robinson’s lawyers resisted extradition there.
Missouri’s problem was that they had no bodies, and it seemed that without Robinson’s cooperation, they would never been found. In October, 2003, a bargain was negotiated in which Missouri only had evidence to convict him of capital murder for Godfrey, Clampitt, Bonner and the Faith women. It was technically a guilty plea, but there was no admission of responsibility for their deaths.
In 2005, Nancy Robinson filed for divorce, ending a 41 year old marriage due to incompatibility and irreconcilable difference. It is unclear exactly how much she knew of her husband’s activities.
In 2006, Heather Robinson, Lisa Stasi’s daughter sued Truman Medical Center in Kansas City, and Karen Gaddis contending the social worker told Robinson about Stasi and her newborn daughter in 1984, after he told her he was looking for “unwed mothers of white babies” for a home that didn’t exist. A year later a settlement was reached for an undisclosed amount between Heather and the hospital. She split the award with her biological maternal grandmother. In order to make sure that Robinson could never profit through a book or movie deal she sued him, and won a $5 billion judgment.
Robinson’s death sentence was upheld in 2015 by the Kansas Supreme Court. Present day he is on death row at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.