CRIME HUNTER: BDSM serial killer 'didn't look dangerous'

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For John Edward Robinson, the internet was a game changer.

There would be no more trolling the greasy back pages of alternative weeklies and swingers magazines. The sexual buffet was all there and only a click or an email away.

The scams came first, the murders would follow.

“I’ve dealt with a wide variety of characters, but never anyone like Robinson,” former probation officer Stephen Haymes told Vanity Fair.

“He’s just chilling. There are so many sides to him. There is the con man after money. There is the murderer. There is the sexual deviant. There is the cover-up artist – the lies, endless lies.”

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Robinson was born in 1943 in the working-class Chicago suburb of Cicero, the son of a binge-boozing father and a disciplinarian mother. Once, as a Boy Scout, he performed for Queen Elizabeth and tragic singer Judy Garland even kissed him backstage.

He later dropped out of college, moved to Kansas City, and in 1964 he married Nancy Jo Lynch. The couple would have four children between 1965 and 1971 and he erected a respectable facade: Husband, father, Scoutmaster, baseball coach, and  Sunday school teacher.

Robinson also embarked on a criminal career as an embezzler and con man par excellence. In addition to myriad scams, he discovered he liked BDSM sex. A lot.

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The smooth-talking swindler eventually took a couple of falls and did time in Missouri and Kansas prisons. Cops didn’t know about his homicidal urges at the time, but they had already begun.

He was mixing scams and homicidal urges with his nocturnal sexual predilections.

– Robinson murdered Paula Guylene Godfrey, 19, in 1984 after luring her to Kansas with a bogus job offer. No trace of her was found.

– The next year he met Lisa Stasi, 19, a single mother with a four-month-old daughter, Tiffany. Robinson would sell the baby to his brother-in-law for $5,500. Stasi was never heard from again.

– The budding serial killer met Catherine Frances Clampitt, 27, in 1987 when she answered a job ad for one of his bogus companies. She disappeared on June 15, 1987.

Robinson was back in the slammer between 1987 and 1993 for a gumbo of frauds. At the Western Missouri Correctional Facility, he met prison librarian Beverly Bonner, 49. When he was sprung, she left her hubby, the prison doctor, and went to work for Robinson.

Her alimony cheques were sent to his post office box. She too was never heard from again

***

Now a free man, Robinson discovered the internet. Adopting the handle Slavemaster, he became obsessed with chatrooms and trolling for new playmates who liked being the submissive partner during sex.

One of his early conquests was a Colorado woman named Sheila Faith, 45, a single mom whose 15-year-old daughter, Debbie Faith, was confined to a wheelchair because of spina bifida. The Faiths moved from California to Kansas City – and both promptly disappeared.

Next on the menu in 1999 was pretty Polish immigrant Izabela Lewicka, 21, who signed a detailed 115-item slave contract giving Robinson complete control of her life – including her money. She too disappeared. Her remains were later discovered in an oil drum on his farm.

Cops found a 27-year-old Michigan nurse named Suzette Trouten on the farm as well. She had moved to Kansas to be Robinson’s submissive sex slave. Robinson told her mother she had robbed him and run off with a new boyfriend.

In between the murders, Robinson maintained an array of BDSM relationships where he could fuel his kinks.

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Even master manipulators and arch-criminals can get sloppy. Robinson was no different and his once fastidious efforts to escape detection began to falter.

One problem was that his name kept appearing in connection with missing persons investigations across Kansas and Missouri.

But it was a sexual battery complaint in 2000 that slammed a torpedo into Robinson’s reign of terror. Worse, another woman accused the creep of stealing her sex toys.

Now, detectives had probable cause to get search warrants. Investigators found the bodies of Lewicka and Trouten in the barn. In Missouri, at two garages rented by Robinson, cops found the bodies of Bonner, Faith, and her daughter.

Investigators said the victims all died from blunt force trauma to the head.

Robinson went on trial in Kansas in 2002 for the slayings of Trouten, Lewicka, and Stasi. It was the longest criminal trial in the state’s history.

He was convicted and the jury voted to send Robinson on the night train to Nowheresville. Robinson pleaded guilty to the Missouri murders to escape another death sentence.

Three years after his conviction, his long-suffering – if not obtuse – wife Nancy called it quits after 41 years of marriage. She cited incompatibility and irreconcilable differences.

The serial killer has never cooperated with the cops and has never shown any remorse.

“He’s maintained the secrets about what he’s done with the women. He won’t ever tell. It’s the last control he’s got,” said one investigator. “There are probably other barrels waiting to be opened, other bodies waiting to be found.”

Robinson currently remains on death row at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun